Hi @smac,
The advantage of the default DDS discovery mechanism is it works out of the box with no configuration, and it works in many situations, including wifi for simple cases. When you have a router that is not handling multicast properly (not all the routers expose this behavior), then I recommend to use alternative mechanisms, such as providing a list of peers, or using a discovery server (also unicast). This always will require some configuration as it depends on your network topology, but it is very easy to setup.
What you are describing, 50 mobile robots, transmitting HD images and point clouds over a saturated wifi, I would not say is a simple hello world robotic application, and some fine tuning for problematic wifi routers could be necessary.
So, to recap, we have 3 options for discovery:
1.- Default DDS Discovery Mechanism using multicast (default for all DDS implementations): No required configuration, works well in many cases, and the current behavior is optimized for lossy wifi networks.
2.- Default DDS Discovery Mechanism using unicast: Requires to provide a list of unicast peers (ip addresses)
3.- Discovery Server: Scales a lot better, as it is not required to have a conversation between every pair of peers, as in the default discovery. Support redundant discovery servers. Requires to provide the ip address of the discovery server.
The cases 2 and 3 are setup though a very simple XML file. What would you recommend to simplify further the configuration? Do you think is better to default the discovery server mechanism?
The user traffic is by default unicast. If you have a lossy network shared by many nodes, it is possible to reach problematic situations way before you reach the theoretical available bandwidth.
With the study we are conducting, we will provide information about different cases, not only for the discovery phase, but also for the user traffic in wide deployments, giving you some general recommendations on how to proceed in such cases.