Flexible Zero-Copy IPC for Processing Chains in ROS 2

As ROS 2 becomes increasingly adopted in safety-critical real-time systems, the performance of its communication layer, especially inter-process communication (IPC), has emerged as a key bottleneck. While intra-process communication benefits from zero-copy transmission, IPC suffers from significant latency due to serialization and memory copying. Existing shared memory approaches offer limited support for ROS 2 applications, as they impose strict constraints on message formats (e.g., requiring statically sized, POD-compatible types) and overlook end-to-end communication across multi-stage pipelines. In this work, we propose a novel and flexible architecture for enabling zero-copy IPC in ROS 2. Our design supports dynamically structured and non-POD message types, integrates seamlessly with the existing communication framework, and requires no modification to application logic. It consists of a Mini Memory Management System (MMS) for shared memory handling and a Message Propagation Adapter (MPA) that ensures compatibility with the ROS 2 communication framework. Our experimental results show that our method significantly reduces communication latency and supports efficient end-to-end message propagation.