ROS 2 Native 5G Support from Ericsson and eProsima

Next Generation ROS
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5G is on the news: 5G routers, mobiles, telephony networks support… it is here already.

Any communications middleware can use 5G as a data link, and ROS 2 is going to work “out of the box” in these networks, but Ericsson has presented some ideas to enable ROS 2 to use the advanced features of 5G.

5G routers allow you to ensure different QoS for different channels also called Unique Networks Flows. You can do things such as reserve bandwidth, ensure guaranteed low latency, etc. All you need to do is to create a unique network flow in your application, and set-up the QoS in your 5G network.

In order to simplify this process, Ericsson and eProsima are enabling native ROS 2 support for creating unique network flows, and we will present some results already in the next middleware WG. Ericsson is working on the RMW support while we are creating the feature at Fast DDS level.

You can count on this feature very soon, and in the meanwhile, we will publish a more complete blog post with some technical details.

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Thanks for the post, Jaime.

To add to your post, for an early introduction to unique network flows, please have a look at the design proposal here that is under discussion in the middleware working group.

Unique network flows between communicating nodes are essential for differentiated QoS from IP-based networks such as 5G. We at Ericsson are working on ROS2 interfaces that communicate to the RMW implementation that unique network flows are required. The intention is to make these interfaces generic enough such that any RMW implementation will be able to support them in a straight-forward manner.

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Thanks @anamud,

I can confirm today we finished the required modifications to Fast DDS.

The modifications are in these branches:
in the RMW: https://github.com/eProsima/rmw_fastrtps/tree/feature/unique_network_flows
in Fast DDS: https://github.com/eProsima/Fast-DDS/tree/feature/endpoint_devoted_resources

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