ipc_shared_ptr: A Publish/Subscribe-Aware Smart Pointer for Cross-Process Object Lifetime Management

TL;DR

The paper introduces ipc_shared_ptr, a pub/sub-aware smart pointer for cross-process message management in IPC, reducing global communication and enabling scalable, zero-copy message sharing in ROS 2 middleware.

Contribution

It proposes a novel reference management technique exploiting pub/sub structure, with a single-writer approach that simplifies implementation while maintaining scalability.

Findings

Single-writer ipc_shared_ptr reduces global communication by an order of magnitude.

Agnocast with ipc_shared_ptr achieves 2.9x lower end-to-end latency than owner-driven approaches.

Evaluation at scale shows the approach is scalable for large ROS 2 applications.

Abstract

True zero-copy Inter-Process Communication (IPC) in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) middleware such as Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) requires subscribers to reference message objects in publisher-owned shared memory. Objects must not be reclaimed while referenced, yet must eventually be reclaimed, with correct handling of crash recovery and Transient Local QoS retention requirements. We propose ipc_shared_ptr, a pub/sub-aware smart pointer for cross-process message lifetime management. ipc_shared_ptr exploits pub/sub structural properties to specialize Birrell's reference listing, limiting global metadata updates to per-subscriber 0<->1 transitions and achieving an order-of-magnitude reduction in global communication over general-purpose distributed reference counting. We analyze the key metadata management tradeoff: scalability versus implementation simplicity. Owner-driven reclaim offers greater scalability, but concurrent membership changes and reclamation decisions produce races that widen the correctness-verification state space. Single-writer achieves structural atomicity, eliminating this complexity at the cost of a centralized bottleneck. iceoryx2 (owner-driven reclaim) and Agnocast -- a true zero-copy ROS 2 IPC middleware sharing the publisher's heap with subscribers and adopting ipc_shared_ptr with single-writer -- embody each architecture. Comparative evaluation at the scale of Autoware -- the largest open-source ROS 2 application -- confirms that single-writer achieves sufficient scalability: at 200 topics, two subscribers per topic and 100 Hz, Agnocast's E2E p99.9 is 2.9x lower than iceoryx2's, justifying implementation simplicity over owner-driven reclaim.