Selective Field Transmission: Bandwidth Efficient Communication under Standardized Message Schemas

2026-06-12

AI Summary

This work addresses the tension in publish-subscribe systems between standardized message formats, which ensure interoperability but incur redundant bandwidth usage, and custom messages, which improve efficiency at the cost of generality. The paper proposes Selective Field Transmission (SFT), a middleware approach that dynamically trims and transmits only the message fields required by each subscriber—without altering the standard message schema—thereby decoupling interface standardization from transmission efficiency for the first time. SFT achieves this through mechanisms including subscriber demand declaration or automatic inference, on-demand serialization, and differentiated multicast delivery. Experimental results demonstrate that bandwidth savings scale proportionally with the number and size of unused fields, while introducing no measurable per-message latency overhead.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and evaluate Selective Field Transmission (SFT), a middleware mechanism that decouples transmission content from statically defined message types in publish-subscribe systems. Industrial and robotics developers often face a dilemma: They can follow established best practices and use standard message types, such as in the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) and COVESA projects, to benefit from reusable and interoperable interfaces, or they can introduce proprietary, project-specific message types tailored to receiver requirements to reduce bandwidth. SFT resolves this trade-off by dynamically adapting the transmitted message components to each receivers actual needs while preserving unmodified standard interfaces. Receivers declare or automatically derive the required message components, which are communicated to the publisher. The publisher then serializes and transmits only the required component subset per receiver with minimal developer intervention. Our evaluation shows that SFT achieves significant bandwidth reductions without measurable per-message latency overhead, with savings proportional to the number and size of unused fields.

Problem

• Selective Field Transmission
• bandwidth efficiency
• standardized message schemas
• publish-subscribe systems
• message serialization

Innovation

• Selective Field Transmission
• Bandwidth Efficiency
• Message Schema
• Publish-Subscribe Systems
• ROS 2