Welcome New IPNSIG Board Members

Congratulations to the newly-elected IPNSIG Board members, Felix Flentge and Juan Fraire.  And please welcome Laura Chappell, who will be taking on the role of Oscar Garcia's Board seat until the next AGM. 

We're thrilled to have you all on the board!! 

Felix Flentge

Felix Flentge is a software engineer in the Ground Segment Engineering and Innovation Department at ESA's Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. He is an expert in space communication protocols and architectures, such as the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol and Disruption Tolerant Networking. Felix is actively supporting and promoting these technologies across all space mission families - from Earth Observation up to interplanetary missions. He is managing a wide range of activities from operational implementation and deployment of communication protocols and systems, inter- agency DTN demonstration activities up to academic cooperation in the areas of real-time DTN services, bundle routing and bundle protocol extensions. Felix is actively contributing to standardization and international coordination in these areas at CCSDS, IOAG and various international working groups including the IPNSIG Architecture & Governance WG.

As a member of the IPNSIG Board, Felix would like to contribute to the realization of the long-term vision of an interoperable and open Solar System Internet by ensuring a coherent and harmonized approach towards the SSI across the various international bodies and working groups based on input from all stakeholders. Towards the establishment of the SSI, he is convinced that we must follow an evolutionary approach where we need to start deploying DTN to space missions and space communication infrastructure (such as Moonlight and LunaNet) now but with maybe initially limited capabilities. At the same time, we need to stay flexible and open to allow these initial small-scale networks to grow into a true SSI within the next decades as technology develops.

Juan Fraire

Juan Fraire is a researcher and professor at INRIA (France) and CONICET-UNC (Argentina) and a guest professor at Saarland University (Germany), where he teaches a unique course about space informatics.

For more than 15 years, Juan has been investigating near-Earth and deep-space networking and informatics. He has published more than 70 papers in international journals and leading conferences and a book about Delay-Tolerant Satellite Networks co-authored with Scott Burleigh (former with JPL and an IPNSIG Board Member). Juan is the founder and chair of the Space-Terrestrial Internetworking Workshop (STINT), and he participates in diverse joint projects with space agencies (e.g., NASA, ESA, CONAE) and companies in the space sector (e.g., D3TN, Spatiam, Skyloom). Juan is currently the coordinator of a French national project called STEREO, where academic and industrial partners join efforts to develop a space-terrestrial integrated Internet of Things, with exciting prospects of realizing new interplanetary exploration concepts based on IoT.

Juan recently contributed to IPNSIG with his graphical design skills, which he developed as a hobby. He is the creator of the current IPNSIG logo, including the primary and IPNSIG Academy logos. These logos were developed in coordination with Yosuke Kaneko (IPNSIG President). Juan also created the winning 100-year IPNSIG vision video, a powerful, eye-catching story-telling animation that conveys IPNSIG's interplanetary network vision. To render the 3D material, Juan developed a realistic and interactive solar system and line-of-sight communication model in Unity. The 3D game engine can serve multiple future purposes for IPNSIG: a) it can be compiled for mobile devices and provided as an educational tool where users can interact and navigate over a solar system network; b) researchers could export realistic interplanetary network topologies from the tool; and c) it can be evolved into a strategy game where users can play and create resource-efficient solar system network systems.

Laura Chappell

Laura Chappell is the Founder of Protocol Analysis Institute and Chappell University, as well as the creator of the WCNA Certification Program. Ms. Chappell researches, documents, and presents information on network protocols, Wireshark, network forensics, and interplanetary communications.

Ms. Chappell is often called in to analyze more complex network problems that require visibility into the communications system. Her clients include the U.S. Navy, IBM Corporation, Apple, Cisco Systems, Disney, U.S. Court of Appeals, United Bank of Switzerland, Australian High Tech Crime Centre, Capital One Financial Services, U.S. Armory, Hong Kong Police Department, Symantec Corporation, McAfee Corporation, Microsoft, Bank of San Francisco, Beth Israel Medical Center (Harvard), U.S. Joint Warfare Analysis Center, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Laura is the IPNSIG Academy Lead and a member of the IPSIG Technical Documentation Working Group, Outreach Working Group, and Architecture and Governance Working Group.

Laura is also the President of the Silicon Valley chapter of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA) and a member of the FBI’s Infragard. She has trained local, regional, national, and international law enforcement officers, as well as corporate security professionals on the methods and tools used to attack and defend networks. Ms. Chappell is also a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (member since 1990).

In 2020, Ms. Chappell joined the Deep Packet Inspection Consortium as a Board Advisor. The DPI Consortium focuses on historical patent protection for DPI-based products and the fight against patent trolls.