Orchestration-Aware Optimization of ROS2 Communication Protocols

The robot operating system (ROS) standard has been extended with different communication mechanisms to address real-time and scalability requirements. On the other hand, containerization and orchestration platforms like Docker and Kubernetes are increasingly being adopted to strengthen platform-independent development and automatic software deployment. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the impact of topology, containerization, and edge-cloud distribution of ROS nodes on the efficiency of the ROS2 communication protocols. We then present a framework that automatically binds the most efficient ROS protocol for each node-to-node communication by considering the architectural characteristics of both software and edge-cloud computing platforms. The framework is available at https://github.com/PARCO-LAB/ros4k.