Virtualized DDS Communication for Multi-Domain Systems: Architecture and Performance Evaluation of Design Alternatives

Modern applications for cyber-physical systems, such as autonomous driving, are more and more often characterized by the interconnection of software components with mixed levels of safety and security deployed on the same hardware platform. Virtualization by means of hypervisor technology is notably the most common approach to allow for the integration of such software components upon the same platform. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a publisher/subscriber middleware protocol that is establishing as a reference solution to put in communication distributed software components. Given these developments, the need for efficiently supporting DDS-based communication in virtualized systems is emerging in several industrial fields, especially when DDS communications interest in-platform software components. This paper presents the design of a virtualized DDS communication architecture for multidomain systems based on para-virtualization and hypervisor technology. The design is then specialized and implemented for the popular Xen hypervisor and Linux operating system, under which a set of implementation options are systematically studied and compared with a wide experimental evaluation.