Transport Plugins

Connext DDS has a pluggable-transports architecture. The core of Connext DDS is transport agnostic—it does not make any assumptions about the actual transports used to send and receive messages. Instead, Connext DDS uses an abstract "transport API" to interact with the transport plugins that implement that API. A transport plugin implements the abstract transport API, and performs the actual work of sending and receiving messages over a physical transport.

There are essentially three categories of transport plugins:

• Builtin Transport Plugins Connext DDS comes with a set of commonly used transport plugins. These ‘builtin’ plugins include UDPv4, UDPv6, and shared memory. So that Connext DDS applications can work out-of-the-box, some of these are enabled by default (see TRANSPORT_BUILTIN QosPolicy (DDS Extension)).
• Extension Transport Plugins RTI offers extension transports, including RTI Secure WAN Transport (see Part 5: RTI Secure WAN Transport and RTI TCP Transport (see Part 8: RTI TCP Transport).
• Custom-developed Transport Plugins RTI supports the use of custom transport plugins. This is a powerful capability that distinguishes Connext DDS from competing middleware approaches. If you are interested in developing a custom transport plugin for Connext DDS, please contact your local RTI representative or email sales@rti.com.

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