WiROS: A QoS Software Solution for ros2 in a WiFi Network

Abstract

Robot Operating System (ROS) has played a pivotal role as a communication middleware among different peripherals, including sensors and actuators of robotics and other systems, with the advancement of connected systems around the globe. The development of DDS (Data Distribution System) based ROS2 has also increased its popularity for applications involving multi-bot communication over the network. However, latency and throughput become bottlenecks for latency-critical applications such as remote surgery and remote driving in dense data traffic. ROS2-based end systems identify the data flow of their sensors' & actuators' messages as topics. A middleware solution must be designed to ensure the QoS (Quality of Service) required by the topics associated with the latency-critical applications. We perform a comparative study of the target application's topic affected by other existing topics in the network. A software solution to ensure the desired QoS to the applications in a static traffic scenario has been developed based on the scheduling of the message data flow and WiFi's EDCA parameters' configurations.