StreamRTPS: Increasing DDS Bandwidth Efficiency by Reducing Protocol Overhead
For developers and users of DDS-based systems, this work improves bandwidth efficiency while maintaining protocol compatibility, but the improvements are incremental.
The paper proposes three extensions to the RTPS wire protocol to reduce overhead in DDS: stream negotiation, payload aggregation, and predictive heartbeat suppression. Experimental results show up to 27.9% bandwidth reduction under best-effort transport and an additional 22.7% under reliable transport, without increasing latency.
In this paper, we propose three extensions to the Real-Time Publish Subscribe wire protocol, on which Data Distribution Service (DDS) is based, to improve bandwidth efficiency. First, a stream negotiation mechanism exchanges static header information during discovery, replacing the full RTPS header at runtime with a compact 2 B identifier. Second, a payload aggregation scheme aggregates samples for the same locator into single UDP packets, reducing IP and UDP header costs. Third, a predictive heartbeat suppression strategy reduces control traffic by omitting heartbeats for periodic communication patterns, falling back upon detected loss or timing violations. All three mechanisms preserve Real-Time Publish Subscribe(RTPS) compatibility by extending DDS discovery to activate these features when supported. Experimental results show that stream headers reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 27.9 % compared to conventional RTPS under best-effort transport, and that heartbeat suppression yields a further 22.7 % reduction on top of stream headers under reliable transport, while preserving transmission latency in both cases.