Abstract
Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a standard communication middleware that is suitable for real-time distributed communication with enhanced flexibility, scalability and interoperability. DDS discovery is a procedure to search the participants and endpoints of DDS network. DDS relies on a multicast mechanism in discovering DDS participants. Due to the features of multicast, DDS has limited discovery range and excessive network traffic. It also wastes of memory space of DDS nodes to keep information of discovered but not communicating participants. Topic Naming Service (TNS) is proposed in this paper in order to solve these problems. TNS maintains a Topic Name Space for managing relationships between endpoints. It selectively delivers discovery messages to appropriate local networks according to the relationship, instead of multicasting the message into the whole network. Through these mechanisms, TNS solves the range limitation of discovery and inefficient resource usage of DDS.