ROS Network Architecture - Bottlenecks?
New to ROS so thanks in advance for your patience!
My planned network architecture consists of a central computer connected via wifi to several (10+) mobile robots. I would like to use ROS to send high level commands from the central computer to the robots, and also to receive high level telemetry information.
But, I will also have several ROS nodes on each individual robot (on a single processor) which will be passing data back and forth with each other. This on-robot processing will happen at a much higher rate than the communication between the central computer and the robots. Note the individual robots won't talk directly to each other at all.
I plan to run my roscore master on the central computer. My concern is about possible network congestion with the ROS traffic on each individual robot. Question 1) Does all ROS traffic pass through the master? Or would messages between nodes residing on a single machine (not the master) stay fully on that machine?
Also, I may have situations where individual robots enter a region with spotty wifi signal, and so will temporarily not have a connection with the master. Question 2) Will that robot's communication between its own ROS nodes (not with the central computer's nodes) be affected by a potential dropout of the connection with the ROS master?