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The paper introduces `ipc_shared_ptr`, a smart pointer designed for zero-copy inter-process communication in publish/subscribe systems like ROS 2, ensuring safe message object lifetime management across processes. It leverages structural properties of pub/sub to optimize reference counting, reducing global metadata updates and communication overhead compared to general distributed reference counting. Experiments using Autoware, a large-scale ROS 2 application, demonstrate that a single-writer architecture with `ipc_shared_ptr` achieves better end-to-end latency compared to owner-driven reclaim, justifying its simplicity.
Achieve a 2.9x reduction in end-to-end latency in ROS 2 communication by trading off scalability for simplicity in cross-process object lifetime management.
True zero-copy Inter-Process Communication (IPC) in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) middleware such as Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) requires subscribers to reference message objects in publisher-owned shared memory. Objects must not be reclaimed while referenced, yet must eventually be reclaimed, with correct handling of crash recovery and Transient Local QoS retention requirements. We propose ipc_shared_ptr, a pub/sub-aware smart pointer for cross-process message lifetime management. ipc_shared_ptr exploits pub/sub structural properties to specialize Birrell's reference listing, limiting global metadata updates to per-subscriber 0<->1 transitions and achieving an order-of-magnitude reduction in global communication over general-purpose distributed reference counting. We analyze the key metadata management tradeoff: scalability versus implementation simplicity. Owner-driven reclaim offers greater scalability, but concurrent membership changes and reclamation decisions produce races that widen the correctness-verification state space. Single-writer achieves structural atomicity, eliminating this complexity at the cost of a centralized bottleneck. iceoryx2 (owner-driven reclaim) and Agnocast -- a true zero-copy ROS 2 IPC middleware sharing the publisher's heap with subscribers and adopting ipc_shared_ptr with single-writer -- embody each architecture. Comparative evaluation at the scale of Autoware -- the largest open-source ROS 2 application -- confirms that single-writer achieves sufficient scalability: at 200 topics, two subscribers per topic and 100 Hz, Agnocast's E2E p99.9 is 2.9x lower than iceoryx2's, justifying implementation simplicity over owner-driven reclaim.
