Analyzing point-to-point DDS communication over desktop virtualization software

• Analysis of communication pattern of traditional point-to-point interactions.
• Model for the integration of the virtualization technology into the communication flow.
• Analysis of the behavior of DDS publish-subscribe for point-to-point communications over desktop virtualization software.
• Identification of main drawbacks to the communication flow performance.

Virtualization technologies introduce additional uncertainty and overhead for distributed applications, that may challenge their timeliness. The additional software abstraction layers of the virtualization software offer powerful parallel execution environments but, at the same time, reduce the effective performance as additional software layers are introduced. This requires some fine tuning of, among others, the communication middleware software. The different resource management mechanisms of the middleware may collide with the specific algorithms replicated by the underlying virtualization software. The present work characterises the set of steps of a publish-subscribe communication middleware in a distributed system, enhancing it to suit the communication scheme of virtualized remote nodes. The potential communication steps are identified, and the overhead introduced by the execution over the virtualization software is provided by means of a data communication rate metric; a set of benchmark tests are presented that empirically evaluate the overhead and stability of the most widely used publish-subscribe (P/S) middleware named DDS (Data Distribution System for real-time systems). A general purpose cloud computing virtual machine monitor is utilized to identify the side effects and the drawbacks of the general virtualization technology. Results are obtained on a setting with two different DDS implementations over a general purpose virtualization software, together with a discussion about the potential drawbacks of the main communication operations.