DDS Implementations as Real-Time Middleware - A Systematic Evaluation

Vincent Bode, Carsten Trinitis, Martin Schulz, David Buettner, Tobias Preclik

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Publish-subscribe messaging has seen increased adoption in the context of timing critical applications, with multiple frameworks integrating publish-subscribe middleware into their ecosystem. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a standard for pub-sub systems that has gained traction, through e.g. the adoption in ROS2, with multiple vendors distributing their implementations of the standard. However, while DDS is being used in a real-time context, the examined implementations are not strictly real-time capable and therefore cannot provide hard timing guarantees to the application. Still, users are looking to take advantage of the flexibility offered by DDS in close-to real-time use cases, raising the question of how well DDS implementations can provide soft real-time reliability assurances. We use DDS-Perf, a novel cross-vendor benchmarking tool for impartial performance analysis of DDS implementations, to examine how reliably four vendors (OpenDDS, RTI Connext, Fast-DDS and CycloneDDS) can deliver real-time-like performance under different scenarios. From a typical out-of-the-box setup, we offer a guide to users for tuning performance/reliability and examine problems users might encounter trying to satisfy real-time constraints. The vendor implementations are tested against a range of experiments to evaluate operating performance under favorable and adverse conditions. Overall, we find that OpenDDS has the worst performance out-of-the-box and after calibration, while FastDDS and CycloneDDS offer the best performance, which is comparable to user-space networking technologies in the average case but with a much higher worst-case latency bound.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 IEEE 29th International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2023
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages186-195
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9798350337860
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event29th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2023 - Niigata, Japan
Duration: 30 Aug 20231 Sep 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2023 IEEE 29th International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2023

Conference

Conference29th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications, RTCSA 2023
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityNiigata
Period30/08/231/09/23

Keywords

  • Cross-Vendor Benchmarks
  • Data Distribution Service
  • Real-time Middle-ware

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