Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) Protocol

The Real-Time Publish Subscribe (RTPS) protocol is the interoperability protocol used to allow multi-vendor Data Distribution Service (DDS)^[1] implementations to communicate.

The Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) protocol is designed for use with Internet Protocol (IP) one-to-many Multicast and connectionless best-effort transports such as IP User Datagram Protocol (UDP).^[2]

The main features of the RTPS protocol include:^[3]

• Performance and Quality-of-Service (QoS) properties enabling best-effort and reliable publish-subscribe communications for real-time applications using standard IP networks.
• Fault tolerance allowing the creation of networks without single points of failure.
• Extensibility allowing backward compatibility and interoperability through extensions of the protocol and enhancement with new services.
• Plug-and-play connectivity for new applications and services allowing automatic, configuration-less discovery by applications joining and leaving the network at any time.
• Configurability allowing balancing the requirements of reliability and timeliness for each data delivery transaction.
• Modularity allowing simple devices to implement a subset of the protocol and still participate in the publish-subscribe network.
• Scalability enabling systems to scale to very large publish-subscribe networks.
• Type-safety preventing application programming errors compromising the operation of remote nodes in the publish-subscribe network.

OMG Data Distribution Service Interoperability Specification History

Object Management Group (OMG) published the following versions of specification

• The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol Specification, V2.2 - Latest version, (September, 2014)^[3]
• The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol Specification, V2.1 (January, 2009)^[4]
• The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol Specification, V2.0 (June, 2007)^[5]
• The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol Specification, V1.2 (June, 2006)

References

1. Data Distribution Service (DDS), Version 1.2, January 2007, http://www.omg.org/spec/DDS/1.2
2. Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) Wire Protocol Specification, Version 1.0, IEC PAS 62030, November 2004
3. The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol Specification, Version 2.2, January 2014, OMG:formal/2014-09-01, http://www.omg.org/spec/DDSI-RTPS/2.2/
4. The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol Specification, Version 2.1, January 2009, OMG:formal/2009-01-05, http://www.omg.org/spec/DDSI/2.1
5. The Real-time Publish-Subscribe Wire Protocol DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol, Version 2.0, April 2008, formal/08-04-09 http://www.omg.org/spec/DDSI/2.0/PDF/

External links

• The OMG DDS RTPS portal
• ZMQ vs RTPS Performance Study