File:PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF ROS 2 NETWORKS USING VARIABLE QUALITY OF SERVICE AND SECURITY CONSTRAINTS FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS (IA performanceanaly1094563441).pdf

This thesis studies the network performance of the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 when used in a network of nodes similar to how a group of unmanned assets would operate. Specifically, this thesis evaluates the impact of combining varying Quality of Service (QoS) and security settings in the ROS 2. It also explores the effect that scaling to multiple nodes has on network performance. This is the first work to comprehensively study ROS 2 network performance using QoS and security classification as a function of scale and message size. Network performance metrics include latency and message drop rate between nodes. Our research uniquely integrates ROS 2 with NS-3, developing a simulation architecture that is effective for rapidly studying ROS 2 network performance. Our simulation results demonstrated the trade-offs in choosing different QoS policies as well as the trade-offs in performance when security settings were enabled. We found that enabling security resulted in a higher message drop rate across all QoS profiles. We also found that scaling the network to more nodes resulted in various consequences with the use of different QoS settings. Scaling up to more nodes in a network also resulted in an equivalent increase in the average latency of messages. This work contributes to evaluating and configuring ROS 2 parameters for different unmanned system use cases while providing a simulation framework on which tests can be run.