AiVibeData Distribution Service (DDS)
DDS is an Object Management Group (OMG) middleware standard for data-centric publish-subscribe communication without a central broker, offering configurable quality-of-service policies for real-time distributed systems.
In DDS, applications publish and subscribe to typed topics within a domain, and participants discover each other automatically. Data is exchanged peer-to-peer over the Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (DDSI-RTPS) wire protocol, typically over UDP, so there is no broker to become a bottleneck or single point of failure. A rich set of quality-of-service policies controls reliability, durability, deadlines, liveliness, history depth and resource limits for each data flow.
DDS is used in defence and aerospace systems, medical devices, autonomous vehicles, power systems and robotics, and ROS 2, the robotics middleware, uses DDS as its default communication layer. In industrial settings it suits applications that need low-latency, many-to-many data sharing between controllers, simulators and analytics. The DDS Security specification adds authentication, access control and encryption.
The flexibility of DDS quality-of-service settings brings configuration complexity, and incompatible settings between a publisher and a subscriber prevent them from communicating. Multicast discovery may not pass through routed or cloud networks without additional configuration. Interoperability between vendor implementations is defined by the RTPS standard but should still be tested.
Key points
- OMG standard for brokerless, data-centric publish-subscribe
- Uses automatic discovery and the DDSI-RTPS wire protocol
- Quality-of-service policies control reliability, durability and deadlines
- Default communication layer of ROS 2
- DDS Security adds authentication, access control and encryption
Where AiVibe comes in
AiAmbA IoT is AiVibe's edge protocol layer: it discovers devices and normalises industrial signals, with supported protocols including Siemens S7, Mitsubishi MC, Delta Modbus, OPC UA and MQTT, and driver availability confirmed per installation. Writes to machines are deny-by-default.