On the Scalability and Efficiency of Intra-Process Communication in ROS 2

The Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) has become a widely adopted middleware framework for building modular and distributed robotic systems. Its intra-process communication mechanism is designed to reduce latency by avoiding serialization and memory copying, which is often treated as a negligible or constant-cost operation in both system design and performance analysis. However, this assumption oversimplifies the underlying behavior and may lead to inaccurate performance models and misleading conclusions, especially in latency-sensitive applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of intraprocess communication in ROS 2, revealing that its performance is highly sensitive to message configuration, workload structure, and message usage strategies. We identify a scalability risk caused by misaligned communication configurations and propose a guideline to ensure efficient and predictable intra-process communication across varying execution patterns. In addition, we uncover a performance bottleneck in the default ROS 2 implementation stemming from repeated message creation. To address this, we propose a novel message pooling mechanism that reuses message objects to exploit temporal locality and eliminate redundant allocations. Our design is fully compatible with existing ROS 2 APIs and requires no modifications to application-level code. Experimental evaluations using synthetic benchmarks and real-world case studies demonstrate substantial improvements in communication latency, validating the practicality of our design. © 2025 IEEE.