Poster: How to Send Large Data in ROS 2

Abstract

High-resolution data streams-such as images, Li-DAR point-clouds-are common in robotic communication, yet Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) struggles to transmit these streams due to increased average latency. On lossy wireless links, the default DDS communication stack in ROS 2 suffers significant performance degradation. This paper presents the first comprehensive network-layer analysis of ROS 2's DDS stack operating over wireless links with large payloads. We analyze three network bottlenecks that emerge during large-payload data transfers and presents DDS-level optimizations for each one. The proposed solutions are exposed through an XML-based QoS configuration interface, allowing them to be easily tuned. Experiments demonstrate that our approach transmits large-payload data successfully while maintaining lower latency than existing methods.