Is DDS for You?

Today's embedded software applications are increasingly distributed; they communicate data between many computing nodes in a networked system. Several network middleware designs have arisen to meet the resulting communications need, including client-server, message passing, and publish-subscribe architectures.

The new Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard is the first comprehensive specification available for "publish-subscribe" data-centric designs. This paper helps system architects understand when DDS is the best fit to an application. It first provides an overview of DDS's functionality and compares it to the other available technologies and standards. Then, it examines driving factors, potential use cases, and existing applications. It concludes with general design guidance to help answer the question of when DDS is the best networking solution.