51. UDPv4, UDPv6, and Shared Memory Transport Plugins

Connext has a pluggable-transports architecture. The core of Connext is transport agnostic—it does not make any assumptions about the actual transports used to send and receive messages. Instead, Connext 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 comes with a set of commonly used transport plugins. These ‘builtin’ plugins include UDPv4, UDPv6, and shared memory. So that Connext applications can work out-of-the-box, some of these are enabled by default (see 44.7 TRANSPORT_BUILTIN QosPolicy (DDS Extension)).
• Extension Transport Plugins RTI offers extension transports, including RTI Real-Time WAN Transport (see 52. RTI Real-Time WAN Transport) and RTI TCP Transport (see 53. RTI TCP Transport).
• Custom-Developed Transport Plugins RTI supports the use of custom transport plugins. This is a powerful capability that distinguishes Connext from competing middleware approaches. If you are interested in developing a custom transport plugin for Connext, please contact your local RTI representative or email sales@rti.com.