Adaptive Bridge: A Proxy-Based Decoupling Layer for Mitigating DDS Backpressure in ROS 2
Adaptive Bridge proxy isolates degraded ROS 2 DDS subscribers, cutting critical p95 tail latency from up to 15 seconds to 1.55 milliseconds.
In ROS 2 systems using DDS, a single impaired RELIABLE-topic subscriber can create backpressure that degrades throughput and latency for all subscribers sharing a publisher, including safety-critical ones. Adaptive Bridge acts as a proxy that splits topics and republishes to independent RELIABLE and BEST EFFORT DDS writers, isolating degraded nodes while a probe-based classifier monitors subscriber health and dynamically adjusts rate limits with hysteresis. Under a Gilbert-Elliott bursty wireless loss model in a reproducible Docker harness, the critical subscriber tail p95 latency falls from up to 15 s to 1.55 ms across all impairment severities. This robotics systems work is tangential to the cyber/AI dashboard scope.