Creation Review

As a consequence of the widespread adoption of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and the raise of ed applications, the number of network connected devices is steadily increasingly as is (1) their heterogeneity with respect to computing, storage and communication capabilities,  (2) the scale at which they produce and consume data and (3) the need for geo-distributed storage and queries. Thus, data exchange protocols face new needs with respect to vertical and horizontal scalability, support for constrained networks and devices with low duty cycle – in other terms devices that are disconnected/sleeping most of the time as well as ability to deal with both data in motion and data at rest. Protocols used today to build these systems, such as MQTT, DDS, CoAP and HTTP were not designed with these needs in mind. As a result, architects and developers are forced into patchwork design in which multiple protocols are stitched together to provide some meaningful end-to-end semantics. Zenoh's authors have co-invented and built some of the communication infrastructures deployed today as part of telecommunication, aerospace and early Industrial Internet applications (notably DDS). It is with this baggage of experience that they came to the realization that a new protocol was needed – a protocol designed ground-up to address the needs of large scale CPS as well as edge systems end-to-end. Eclipse zenoh, is a stack  designed to (1) minimize network overhead – the minimal wire overhead of a data message a data message is 4 bytes, (2) support extremely constrained devices – its footprint on Arduino Uno is of 300 bytes, (3) supports devices with low duty-cycle by allowing the negotiation of data exchange modes and schedules, (4) provide a rich set of abstraction for distributing, querying and storing data along the entire system, and (5) provide extremely low latency and high throughput.