Technologies

Data Distribution Service

The Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems™ (DDS™) is a leading data-centric publish and subscribe style of communications standard from the Object Management Group®(OMG®) for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

OMG DDS enables scalable, real-time, reliable, high performance and interoperable data exchanges between publishers and subscribers. OMG DDS is designed to address the needs of mission and business-critical IoT and IIoT applications such as air traffic control, transportation management, healthcare, energy and utilities, software defined networking and other big data applications.

OMG DDS is both language and Operating System (OS) independent. The APIs specified by the OMG DDS standard have been implemented in a range of different programming languages including Ada, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Scala, Lua, and Ruby. Using standardized APIs helps ensure that OMG DDS applications can be ported easily between different vendor’s implementations.

Vortex DDS is the most advanced, complete and leading (Commercial and Open Source) implementation of the OMG DDS standard. Vortex enables data to be shared and integrated across a wide spectrum of operating systems and platforms. Vortex provides a full implementation of both the OMG DDS latest rev1.4 (DCPS profiles) and the OMG-DDSI / RTPS interoperable wire-protocol.

What are the Benefits of DDS?

The Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) has many benefits including:

DDS makes it much easier to develop distributed applications: DDS provides a completely de-centralized architecture that enables loosely coupled systems. Applications communicate in a true peer-to-peer way, there are no intermediate services or message brokers that can introduce single points of failure or performance bottlenecks. DDS systems are dynamic and can support "plug-and-play" for new application components making it easy to extend or evolve a system. DDS applications are completely decoupled from each other and an application can still publish information even if there are no subscriber applications active. DDS automatically decides which subscriber applications should receive information and can ensure that the right data is delivered reliably and in real-time to the right subscriber applications.
DDS reduces costs: DDS can significantly reduce the time to market for new products and can help ensure cost savings across the life cycle of a project by enabling systems that are easier to design, implement, integrate, deploy and maintain.
DDS supports application portability: the DDS standard defines a Data Centric Publish Subscribe (DCPS) layer providing a set of APIs and corresponding programming language specific mappings that present a coherent set of standardized “profiles” targeting real-time information-availability across multiple applications domains (from large scale enterprise systems to resource constrained embedded systems). The standardised APIs help ensure maximum portability between different DDS implementations.
DDS enables interoperability between applications: DDS also specifies a wire protocol, the DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol, referred to as DDSI. A wire-level protocol refers to the mechanism for transmitting data from point-to-point. A wire protocol is needed if more than one application has to interoperate. In contrast to protocols at the transport level (like TCP or UDP), the term wire-protocol is used to describe a common way to represent information at the application level.
DDS provides users with vendor independence and choice: DDS is an international and open standard from the Object Management Group (OMG). By using a technology compliant with a standard such as DDS, users are protected from vendor lock-in and are provided with choice. If you are not happy with you current vendor or the quality of their implementation, switching to an alternative is very straight forward in comparison to basing a system on non-standard proprietary technology which you may be locked into.
DDS is programming language independent: the DCPS APIs have been implemented in a range of different languages including Ada, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Scala, Lua and Ruby giving users great flexibility in their choice of programming language.
DDS is operating system and hardware independent: DDS implementations are available on many flavors of operating system including different variations of Windows, Linux and Unix. It is also available on more specialised real-time operating systems (RTOSs) such as VxWorks, ElinOS, QNX, Integrity and mobile operating systems such as Android. DDS can also be used independently from the underlying hardware and support is available for a range of devices including sensors, other types of specialized real-time embedded processing unit, mobile handheld devices, desktops, enterprise servers or just about any other type of computing resource that needs to share data.
DDS can be used to share information across heterogeneous networks: DDS can support different network configurations including over a LAN, or WAN (Internet) and via a range of wired and wireless communication technologies including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM, GPRS, GPS, 3G, 4G.
DDS enables high performance scalable systems: DDS provides the low latency, high throughput communications required by the most demanding applications.
DDS can be used in real-time systems: DDS enables predictable and deterministic data sharing between applications by enabling users to have control over the real-time behavior of the system. QoS can be specified to control timing, communication channel priority and resource utilization.
DDS filters information based on an application’s needs: filtering based on content ensures that applications only receive the data that they are specifically interested in. This frees a subscribing application from performing complex sorting algorithms in order to access information of interest.
DDS provides tailored data management: the rich set of QoS provided by DDS enables users to tune the communications behavior of the system to meet specific requirements.
DDS enables fault tolerant and reliable systems: the de-centralised architecture of DDS mans that applications can communicate with each other independently from other servers, message brokers or communication services that can act as single points of failure or potential performance bottlenecks. DDS applications exchange data with each other directly in a true peer-to-peer way. DDS publishers and subscribers are completely de-coupled in space and time. This means that a so called “late-joining” subscriber can successfully receive data published before the subscriber itself was started. DDS is responsible for the storage and deliver of the data. Alternatively DDS can be configured to manage data from multiple sources so that if one publisher fails a subscriber can still receive the information it needs from an alternative source. DDS can also guarantee that data can be exchanged successfully between applications even if the network is un-reliable. No information is ever lost and DDS ensures that a data exchange is repeated until successful.

Vortex DDS is the leading (Commercial and Open Source) implementation of the DDS standard.

What is Middleware?

Middleware in a distributed system is the software layer that lies between the operating system and applications and enables the various components of a system to communicate and manage data. The purpose of middleware is to simplify the development of complex distributed systems by making it easier for applications to communicate with each other in a networked environment while enabling software developers to focus on the specific purpose of the application (the business logic). Middleware is often referred to as "plumbing" as it is used to connect applications and enable then to exchange data. It includes web servers, application servers, object request brokers, messaging systems, data distribution services and similar tools that can support distributed application development and deployment.

Middleware can perform a critical role in enabling interoperability between applications that may be written in different programming languages, running on different operating systems and underlying hardware by providing the ability to exchange data in a standards-based way. It also provides services and standard APIs that allow applications to:

locate other applications transparently across a network
filter data so that applications can exchange information in the most efficient manner and best use of network resources
provide independence from programming language, operating system, network services and hardware
provide a standard management API for applications
be reliable and fault tolerant
support the secure transfer of data between applications

Messaging Protocols

An understanding of both the architecture and the message / data sharing requirements of each target system is an important pre-requisite for choosing the most appropriate messaging protocol solution for the Internet of Things IoTand Industrial Internet IIoT. A number of key messaging technologies are emerging that will support the next generation of IoT applications. These messaging technologies include Data Distribution Service DDS, Constrained Application Protocol CoAP, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport MQTT, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol AMQP, Java Message Service JMS, eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol XMPP and Representational State Transfer REST, each of which can be used to connect devices in a distributed network. However, their suitability to support the different operational scenarios considered, including Inter and Intra Device communication, Device to Cloud communication and Inter Data Center communication varies, especially when key system requirements such as performance, quality-of-service, interoperability, fault tolerance and security are taken into account.

Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)

The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Consortium is taking a leadership role in developing open standards for avionics systems of the future so helping to make military aviation computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable and secure. We provide an Open Source (LGPL) FACE 2.1 Transport Services Segment (TSS) Reference Implementation for developers to use with the Data Distribution Service standard.

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