Why doesn't RTI Connext support Broadcast?

Submitted by Juanjo Martin on Thu, 01/17/2013 - 06:35

Note: Applies to NDDS 3.x, RTI Connext 4.x and above.

There are several drawbacks to using broadcast. 

  • There is a performance degradation problem when using broadcast. It disrupts EVERY node in the system-even the ones that do not want ANY data! Such a system is clearly not scalable. 
  • With broadcast, you cannot send over MTU (no IP fragmentation for broadcast), so the performance of large data transfers would suffer. 
  • Broadcasting critical data would compromise security. Anyone with a laptop with Ethereal installed would be able to gather the data. The same applies for multicast, but you do have the option to send data over unicast instead. (If security is important to you, note that RTI Connext does support 'hooks' in the serialization/deserialization routines for encryption. Encryption can also be done at the transport level for even further security.)
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