OMG Data-Distribution Service: architectural overview

The OMG Data-Distribution Service (DDS) is an emerging specification for publish-subscribe data-distribution systems. The purpose of the specification is to provide a common application-level interface that clearly defines the data-distribution service. The specification describes the service using UML, thus providing a platform-independent model that can then be mapped into a variety of concrete platforms and programming languages. The OMG DDS attempts to unify the common practice of several existing implementations [2, 5] enumerating and providing formal definitions for the QoS (Quality of Service) settings that can be used to configure the service. This paper introduces the OMG DDS specification, describes the main aspects of the model, QoS settings, and gives examples of the communication scenarios it supports.