Evaluating the Performance of Publish/Subscribe Platforms for Information Management in Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems

Abstract: Recent trends in distributed real-time and embed- ded (DRE) systems motivate the development of infor- mation management capabilities that ensure the right information is delivered to the right place at the right time to satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements in heterogeneous environments. A promising approach to building and evolving large-scale and long-lived DRE information management systems are standards-based QoS-enabled publish/subscribe (pub/sub) platforms that enable participants to communicate by publishing information they have and subscribing to information they need in a timely manner. Since there is little exist- ing evaluation of how well these platforms meet the performance needs of DRE information management, this paper provides two contributions: (1) it describes three common architectures for the OMG Data Distri- bution Service (DDS), which is a QoS-enabled pub/sub platform standard, and (2) it evaluates implementa- tions of these architectures to investigate their design tradeoffs and compare their performance with each other and with other pub/sub middleware. Our results show that DDS implementations perform significantly better than non-DDS alternatives and are well-suited for certain classes of data-critical DRE information management systems.