Communication Library Comparison

Minimal examples to check selected libraries from "Proposed options for simulator architecture" document

Roadmap

• MQTT
  • Industrial Communication Toolbox doesn't include any Simulink blocks, corroborated by existence of a commercial option
• Data Distribution Service
  • Multiple features fail without full RTI Connext installation. That doesn't meet our licensing requirements:

    The RTI Connext for DDS Blockset includes a short term evaluation license

  • When just running the Simulink model it isn't detected by ddsls (unlike a Python subscriber), the model needs to be built and run with MATLAB Coder (if I understood right), found example of a similar failure
• ZeroMQ
  • Successful, but complicated setup with compiling extensions for Simulink. No specific information is given on failure to load a module
  • Based on a blog post by a MathWorks employee
    • The method for building libzmq in the post is deprecated, now CMake has to be used
• MAVLink
  • Available since MATLAB R2019a
  • Installation in Simulink requires only UAV Toolbox, and a Instrument Control Toolbox for UDP blocks

Installation

Optional, but recommended: create and activate Python virtual environment

pip install -r requirements.txt

MQTT

Windows installer for Mosquitto

Add installation folder to Path environment variable, default C:/Program Files/mosquitto

Install "Industrial Communication Toolbox" in MATLAB

DDS

To avoid compiling the CycloneDDS C library from source, you need to use a Python version for which there are prebuilt binaries on pip available. At the time of writing this were CPython versions 3.7 to 3.10 (inclusive).

ZeroMQ

Requires a working installation of Visual Studio to compile MATLAB extensions.

After cloning this repository run the following to get all dependencies. Do not use the git_clone_zmq and build_zmq buttons in the Simulink project, start with SetEnvVariable.

git submodule update --init

Then run the patch.py script in zeromq folder to update the Simulink example.

Warning

Currently, prebuilt binaries for ZeroMQ are included only for 64-bit Windows