What is XRCE?
The DDS-XRCE wire protocol has been standardized by the OMG (Object Management Group). The OMG was founded in 1989 and creates and maintains computer industry specifications.
The DDS-XRCE protocol offers a way to communicate data of resource constrained environments to larger systems using the DDS standards.
XRCE Model:
XRCE stands for eXtremely Resource Constrained Environments and refers to generally small devices with limited memory capacities. The DDS-XRCE protocol offers a way to communicate data of resource constrained environments to larger systems using the DDS standards.
Implementations of this specification extend the minimal necessary capability of DDS to very constrained environments and extend the reach of larger systems already using DDS technology to disseminate data into enterprise systems.
XRCE Architecture:
The XRCE protocol, allows the XRCE devices, called clients, to communicate with a server, called an agent. This XRCE Agent allows the devices to publish or subscribe to topics in the DDS domain, called Global Data Space.
As the DDS-XRCE protocol is applied on small, limited devices, The goal is not to embed all of DDS into such a restricted environment, but rather to allow such limited processing to act as a participant in a larger DDS ecosystem.
XRCE Motivation:
The DDS-XRCE protocol has been developed for devices and networks with the following characteristics:
- Operability over networks with bandwidth 40-100Kbps
- Devices with sleep/wake cycles
- Support specialized languages or frameworks
- Plug-and-Play characteristics due to dynamic discovery
- Publish or subscribe to any data type
- Support updates to multiple data-times on the same or multiple DDS Topics
- Support information both reliably and in a best effort manner
- Support secure communication at the transport level
- Provide full read/write access
- Full implementation with less than 100KB of code
The general motivation of DDS-XRCE is to give industry solution providers of DDS technology a common way of bringing a very disparate family of technology (small, limited equipment) into a larger system. Therefore, the standard interoperability among different suppliers is maintained and one-off or proprietary solutions for each pathway are not required.
Available Implementations:
Micro XRCE-DDS is eProsima’s XRCE middleware solution. It is fully open source and comes with an Apache 2.0 licence.
For more Information About XRCE:
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