UDPROS: Unicast, Broadcast, or Multicast?

Question

Is the underlying UDPROS implementation a unique UDP unicast from each publisher to any subscriber who requests UDP? If so, is there any interest in reducing the network load by utilizing either UDP broadcast or multicast so that only one UDP packet is sent to all subscribers?

I know this may be useful for multiple robots coordinating through ROS over flaky wifi.

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Originally posted by Dr. Love on ROS Answers with karma: 51 on 2012-12-12

Post score: 4

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Original comments

Comment by Pablo Iñigo Blasco on 2012-12-13:
It would be really great to have multicast UDP. And in fact, IMHO the concept of a topic fits better with multicast communications than with unicast. I'm pretty sure than in the future we will enjoy this feature.

Comment by devnaga on 2018-12-10:
i was doing some experiments with UDP multicasting here: https://github.com/DevNaga/EDGEMW/blob/master/distcom/distcomm_pub.c

This is not really based off of the ROS underlying XMLRPC but just a POC

Answer 1

As far as I know, at the moment only UDP unicast is supported at the moment. I'm sure the community would be happy about a multicast implementation. I'm not sure though how easy to implement it is.

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Originally posted by Lorenz with karma: 22731 on 2012-12-13

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2