Researchers have proposed Adaptive Bridge, a proxy-based decoupling layer aimed at a long-standing failure mode in ROS 2 systems that rely on the Data Distribution Service (DDS) for transport. According to the paper, a single network-impaired or throttled subscriber on a RELIABLE topic can trigger backpressure that degrades throughput and latency for every other subscriber sharing the same publisher — including safety-critical nodes — because the publisher's DDS writer can no longer accept new samples.
The proposed bridge sits between publishers and subscribers as a middleman. It subscribes to the original topic and republishes messages to two independent DDS writers: a RELIABLE writer serving critical nodes and a BEST EFFORT writer serving noncritical or degraded nodes. This topic splitting is intended to isolate degraded subscribers so they cannot stall the publisher or the critical path.
Adaptive Bridge also includes a probe-based classifier that monitors subscriber health through sampling with hysteresis and adjusts subscriber rate limits in real time, adding dynamic rate control on top of the static split.
The authors evaluated the system under a Gilbert-Elliott bursty wireless loss model using a reproducible Docker-based harness. They report that the bridge reduced critical-subscriber tail p95 latency from up to 15 seconds to 1.55 ms across all impairment severities tested, while preserving the publisher's configured throughput.
The work is accompanied by a public GitHub repository. The paper's source text does not report additional benchmarks, hardware details, or comparisons against alternative mitigation strategies.