rTransport

rTransport is a modular transport abstraction designed to support reliable, low-latency communication in distributed systems, with a focus on robotics, autonomous systems, and real-time simulation. It aims to separate message routing and carrier transport from application logic by providing a consistent API across transport backends.

Its architecture typically comprises a core session manager, a channel or stream multiplexing layer, and backend adapters. The core handles session lifecycle, sequencing, acknowledgments, and retries; the multiplexing layer supports multiple logical channels over a single connection; backend adapters implement transport protocols such as TCP, UDP, WebSocket, or QUIC.

Semantics include reliability guarantees like at-least-once or exactly-once delivery, in-order delivery within a channel, and configurable quality-of-service parameters. rTransport emphasizes deterministic latency and jitter bounds for real-time use cases, often employing timeouts, backoff strategies, and message framing with length-prefixing or delimiting.

Security and interoperability are addressed via transport-level encryption and authentication (for example TLS) and cross-language bindings in languages such as C++, Rust, and Python. It supports session resumption, heartbeat messages, and flow control to prevent congestion.

Usage and status: In practice, rTransport appears in a range of research and development projects rather than as a single standardized standard. It is used to connect robotic controllers, simulators, and edge devices, and is often implemented as open-source libraries with pluggable backends. The term may also denote various project-specific transport layers sharing a common naming convention.