RTI Data Distribution Service

High-performance DDS compliant integration middleware

RTI Data Distribution Service brings the benefits of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to real-time systems. It uniquely combines loose coupling, full standards compliance and extremely high performance to overcome the limitations of traditional integration approaches: the complexity and brittleness of point-to-point communication and the poor performance and scalability of Web Services and other Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) implementations.

Highlights

• Standard interfaces: DDS, RTPS, JMS, Web Services, SOAP, REST, SQL
• Integrated with Microsoft Excel, relational databases, Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines, visualization platforms, Application Servers and ESBs
• Data-centric publish/subscribe messaging for loose coupling
• Automatic discovery for zero-administration plug and play integration
• Decentralized peer-to-peer architecture with no brokers, servers or daemon processes

Industry-Standard Interfaces

The foundation of RTI Data Distribution Service is a high-performance message bus based on the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) standard. DDS is the only general-purpose middleware standard designed specifically to satisfy the performance and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of real-time systems. It eliminates vendor dependence through specification of both an application programming interface for cross-vendor portability and a wire protocol (RTPS) for cross-vendor interoperability.

RTI Data Distribution Service augments DDS with adapters to other widely used middleware standards and applications. These include JMS, Web Services, SOAP, REST, SQL and Microsoft Excel. This broad interoperability eases integration of real-time applications with legacy and non-real-time applications. As a result, it fosters net-centricity and eliminates the need for custom bridging and integration solutions.

Loose Coupling

RTI Data Distribution Service employs a data-centric integration model to decouple applications. Applications communicate by publishing the data they produce and subscribing to the type of data they consume. They require no knowledge of each other, only of the data they exchange. RTI Data Distribution Service automatically discovers and establishes data flows between matching publishers and subscribers. This model provides a number of significant benefits:

• It minimizes integration time because adding, upgrading or removing applications has no impact on the rest of a system. Even live systems can be dynamically updated.
• It is the most efficient communications paradigm for real-time systems since they are inherently data- or event-driven. With RTI Data Distribution Service, publish/subscribe does not have to be implemented on top of a different integration pattern.
• It is well suited to systems in which many applications produce or consume the same type of data (one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many communication). Multicast support provides very efficient distribution of data to multiple subscribers.

Plug and Play Integration

Support for automatic discovery enables the deployment of autonomous, ad hoc and self-healing systems. RTI Data Distribution Service spontaneously discovers the presence of new applications and connects them to other applications that share the same data. Likewise, applications continue to function when previously-connected peers are no longer accessible. This plug and play functionality eliminates the need for configuration, administration or directory services. Applications can even dynamically adapt to their deployment environment by accessing discovery information to determine the available data topics and their schema.

High Performance, Scalability and Robustness

The run-time architecture of RTI Data Distribution Service is completely decentralized to maximize performance, scalability and robustness. Publishers send messages directly to subscribers in a true peer-to-peer manner. Data is not routed through any intermediate broker, server or daemon processes as it is with other ESBs, enterprise messaging solutions and DDS implementations. This architecture:

• Eliminates bottlenecks and choke points to minimize latency and maximize system-wide throughput and scalability
• Eliminates any single point of failure or security vulnerability
• Supports deployments in which servers are unfeasible, such as ad hoc tactical environments
• Eases embedding, since applications are completely self-contained and do not depend on any external service or administration
• Reduces IT costs by eliminating servers

Features

• Proven in over 400 unique designs and over 100,000 deployed systems
• Highly available with no single point of failure and automatic application failover
• Secure architecture with support for secure operating systems and transports
• Applications are interoperable across programming languages and platforms
• Applications are independent of the underlying transport and network type
• Supports intermittent, lossy and high delay networks such as wireless and satellite
• Plug-in API allows support for custom transport protocols and networks
• Safety-Critical Edition for high-assurance applications

By supporting the loose coupling and comprehensive interoperability of an ESB together with the performance of point-to-point communication, RTI Data Distribution Service revolutionizes real-time application integration.

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