DDS is a type of networking middleware. Its standards are managed by the Object Management Group (OMG). It is a bus-style architecture; a centralized node is not required. Communication is peer-to-peer and not centrally controlled.

Endpoints for communication are automatically discovered by DDS through a process called dynamic discovery. DDS uses a variant of the publish/subscribe model, where nodes on the bus announce what data they are publishing and what data they want to subscribe to.

DDS participants could be on the same machine or at the same factory or even spread over a wide area. It could be all of those combined when individual DDS domains are linked together. It is a very scalable architecture.

Data exchange is real time and dependable with high transfer rates. DDS handles the details of the transfer work for you such as message addressing, delivery, flow control, retries, and data marshaling/demarshaling. Any node could be a publisher, a subscriber, or both at the same time.

To an application on a device using DDS, the data looks like native memory that is accessed through an API. This is through the local data store maintained by DDS called the Global Data Space. It is an illusion to the application; only data that is needed is kept locally and only as long as it is needed.