Understanding RTPS: The Real-Time Publish-Subscribe Protocol
Real-time communication is the requirement in all applications like autonomous vehicles, robots, and factory automation. RTPS provides a highly efficient and reliable vehicle through which such systems can be made to communicate in real time.
What is RTPS?
RTPS is Real-Time Publish-Subscribe System and distributed system communication protocol used in real-time data exchange between entities. RTPS offers publish-subscribe communication wherein the publishers construct the messages and the subscribers run them but not necessarily one for another.
Principal RTPS Features:
- Decoupled Communication: Publisher and the subscriber are decoupled in the sense that the publishers don’t know the subscriber’s name.
- Real-Time Delivery of Messages: It supports delivery of the messages in real time, most critical for low-latency communication-bundled applications.
- Scalability: RTPS is scalable so that thousands of publishers and subscribers can be supported.
- Reliability: It supports message acknowledgement and retry on data loss.
RTPS vs. DDS:
Whereas RTPS is a message passing protocol, DDS is infrastructure and architecture that happens to use RTPS as a transport sublayer. DDS also provides other facilities at higher levels like quality of service (QoS) parameters and data management.
Use Cases:
Autonomous Systems: RTPS is used for real-time transfer of data between the autonomous systems where sensors, decision blocks, and controllers need to pass data in real time.
Robotics: RTPS enables perfect data exchange of information between the controllers and the robots.
Industrial Automation: RTPS enables industrial actuators and sensors to exchange data in real time and therefore makes the system efficient as well as safe.
Advantages of RTPS:
Low Latency: RTPS enables low latency data that is appropriate for those systems where low latency is an issue.
Adaptive QoS Settings: Offers adaptation of quality of service like message reliability, message persistence, and message delivery time.
Interoperability: Since RTPS is independent of hardware and software, various software and hardware platforms can be made interoperable.
Conclusion:
RTPS offers strong real-time communications in hard distributed systems. Due to its low latency, reliability, and scalability, it is the appropriate solution wherever timely data sharing matters.
