Analysis of swarm application layer protocols (SALP) used in event-driven communication

Communications and communication protocols play an important role in mobile robotic systems (MRS). Addressing real-time mobile robot applications, MRS should communicate with minimal effort and resources, dealing with long delays and any losses incurred. In a swarm scenario implementing a stack of communication protocols becomes a key factor for both the performance and the regular operation. The paper aims to review the most widely used application layer protocols for swarm robot scenarios. These protocols are the short publish-subscribe message protocols available for application layer communication (ALC). In the paper, we present specific design guidelines for the pipeline architecture implementing MAVLink, DDS-XRCE, and rosserial application protocols (SALP) in an event-driven realtime communication channel. The shown pipelines architecture is a conceptual model for hybrid and cluster-based distributed fault-tolerant networks using a zero-copy shared memory approach with over inter-process-communication (IPC).