IP on homing pigeons

Messenger dove.

IP over Homing Pigeons is a sarcastic network protocol proposal created on April 1, 1990 for the transmission of datagrams of the IP protocol using homing pigeons. It was defined in recommendation RFC 1149, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) written by D. Waitzman. It is part of the RFCs from April 1, when, as part of the April Fools' Day (April Fool's Day), it is customary among computer network experts to add a humorous RFC

On April 1, 1999, the RFC 2549 recommendation was published, an extension of the previous one called IP over homing pigeons with quality of service. In addition, RFC 6214, published on April 1, 2011, 13 years after the adoption of IPv6, was an extension of RFC 1149 for this protocol.

IPoAC has been successfully implemented for nine packets, with a loss rate of 55% due to operator failure, and a response time between 3,000 and 6,000 seconds (54 minutes and 1.77 hours, respectively), thus that this technology suffers from high latency. Even so, for large transfers, pigeons are capable of high performance, implementing a sneakernet. In recent years, the storage capacity, and therefore the density of information that a pigeon can carry has grown 3 times faster than the Internet bandwidth. Thus, if 16 pigeons take 1 hour to carry each SD card of 512 GB, the average transmission speed will be 145.6 Gbit/s, excluding transmission to and from SD cards.