eProsima Discovery Server DocumentationΒΆ

eProsima

The RTPS standard specifies in section 8.5 a non-centralized, distributed simple discovery mechanism. This mechanism was devised to allow interoperability among independent vendor-specific implementations but is not expected to be optimal in every environment. There are several scenarios were the simple discovery mechanism is unsuitable or plainly cannot be applied: a) a high number of endpoint entities are continuously entering and leaving the communication, b) wide communication systems deployment, and c) networks without multicasting capabilities.

In order to cope with the above issues, the eProsima Fast DDS discovery mechanism was extended with a new Discovery Server discovery mechanism. This mechanism is based on a client-server discovery paradigm, i.e. the metatraffic (message exchange among DDS DomainParticipants to identify each other) is managed by one or several server DomainParticipants (left figure), as opposed to simple discovery (right figure), where metatraffic is exchanged using a message broadcast mechanism like an IP multicast protocol. Please, refer to Fast DDS documentation for further information about the Discovery Server discovery mechanism.

Warning

This documentation refers to the GitHub Discovery Server repository, which implements an application to test the Discovery Server discovery mechanism. Therefore it should be emphasized that Discovery Server is a discovery mechanism already available in Fast DDS and this documentation refers to an application mainly used to test this functionality.

This documentation is organized into the following sections: