Robotics Service Bus

h1. SpreadProtocol

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This wiki page describes the protocol used by the spread-based connectors.

h2. Data Format

Data exchanged on spread is encoded using Google protocol buffers. A spread message always contains a notification (source:/trunk/protocol/RSBProtocol/Protocol.proto) as elementary communication unit. Descriptions of the Notification contents are given as comments on the descriptor file.

h2. Fragmentation

Because spread has a message size limit, a single @Notification@ may not be sufficient to transport a whole event with a huge amount of user data. Hence, events may be encoded in several @Notification@ s sent subsequently. In this case the multiple @Notification@ objects are constructed according to the following rules:
* The size of individual fragments (i.e. the values of @Notification.data@) must not exceed 100,000 octets
* Fragment number are in the range [0, NUMBER-OF-FRAGMENTS - 1]
* Most field values are repeated in all @Notification@ s, in particular:
** The id of the event (@Notification.id@ field)
** The number of @Notification@ s into which the event has been split (@Notification.num_data_parts@ field)
* The two fields which differ among @Notification@ s for one event are:
** The index of the data chunk encoded in the Notification (@Notification.data_part@ field).
** The user data (@Notification.data@ field) are split.

h2. Hierarchical Bus

The hierarchical bus is created by sending each message to a group corresponding to its scope as well as groups corresponding to all super scopes including "/" (multigroup mulitcast).

_Example_
<pre>
super-scopes(/foo/bar/, include-self? = yes) = /, /foo/, /foo/bar/
</pre>

h2. Group Names

Group names are created by applying the following steps to the fully formal scope string representation (*including trailing slash*):
# Hash the scope string using "MD5":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5.
# Convert the 16 bytes of output to a 32 character string by concatenating the *zero-padded* hex (base-16) representations of the individual bytes.
Letters of the hex representation have to be lower case.
# Remove the final character of the hex representation of the hash.
(Since spread group names can only be 32 bytes long _including the 0-terminator_)

_Example_
<pre>
/ -> "6666cd76f96956469e7be39d750cc7d\0"
/foo/ -> "4f87be8f6e593d167f5fd1ab238cfc2\0"
/foo/bar/ -> "1c184f3891344400380281315d9e738\0"
</pre>

h2. Quality of Service

The following table explains how the 2D RSB QoS settings are mapped to spread message types.

| |_.UNRELIABLE |_.RELIABLE | ||_.UNRELIABLE|_.RELIABLE|
|_.UNORDERED | UNRELIABLE_MESS | RELIABLE_MESS | |_.UNORDERED|UNRELIABLE_MESS|RELIABLE_MESS|
|_.ORDERED | FIFO_MESS | FIFO_MESS |

h2. Implementations

|_.Language |_.File(s)/Directory |
| C++ | source:trunk/cpp/core/src/rsb/transport/spread |
| Java | source:trunk/java/core/src/rsb/transport/spread |
| Python | source:"trunk/python/core/rsb/rsbspread/__init__.py" |
| Common Lisp | source:trunk/cl/cl-rsb/src/transport/spread |
|_.ORDERED|FIFO_MESS|FIFO_MESS|