Madrid, December 2020
2021 is just around the corner and so is ROS 2 Galactic.
eProsima is preparing to celebrate this new ROS 2 release with some upcoming, new features for Fast DDS regarding Network health: the Smart Flow Controller, the Network Statistics, and Network Health GUI!
Network health is an important issue for the system to work correctly. Time of reactions to any distortion and lossy networks can be crucial and eProsima is working on the solution.
Currently, eProsima Fast DDS offers a Flow Controller that can be used to manage the available bandwidth. Instead of sending the data immediately, the publisher sends the messages asynchronously following the policy specified by the flow controller. In this way, for instance, the amount of bytes sent per second can be limited beforehand. As a result, the network works more efficiently avoiding bursts of messages. Since ROS 2 offers asynchronous publishing by default, this feature is already available.
The future Smart Flow Controller will go further and adapt the sending rate to the network conditions automatically. This will be possible thanks to a second future feature: the Network Statistics.
Possible statistics will include Msgs/bytes received, Msgs/bytes lost, ACKs, NACKs, etc., and by taking those into account the Smart Flow Controller will make up for any temporal loss of signal, low intensity or congestion issue on its own.
Last but not least, the planned Network Health GUI will be able to display and analyze the network statistics graphically.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT EPROSIMA FAST DDS AND THE SMART FLOW CONTROLLER:
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