Eclipse Zenoh 1.1.0 Official release - Supporting ICOS’s Data Distribution from the Cloud-to-Thing continuum (Part 2)

As presented in the February 2023 ICOS's blog post. Eclipse Zenoh is a Pub/Sub/Query protocol designed to provide a set of unified abstractions to deal with data-in-motion, data-at-rest and computations at internet scale.

Moving forward two year, the latest release of Zenoh 1.1.0 in December 2024 named “Firesong”, brings new features and improvements while keeping focus on the values of the ICOS project. This update reflects priorities such as adaptability, security, and performance optimization, ensuring an efficient and interconnected ecosystem for devices, applications, and data.

Openness and Interoperability

Zenoh 1.1.0 embrace openness, enabling diverse technologies to collaborate. For example, the new querier API supports efficient and optimized data retrieval. Enhanced support for ROS 2, a widely-used framework in robotics, strengthens connections between Zenoh and other platforms, facilitating interoperability.

Adaptability and Scalability

Zenoh 1.1.0 introduces features that adapt to varying technological needs. The stabilization of liveliness API support, ensures real-time monitoring of active participants in the network. Zenoh-Pico which is made for small IoT devices has also been updated. With huge improvements in performance and extension in scope as it is now compatible with Raspberry Pi Pico series.

Security and Privacy

The protocol enhancements address critical issues such as fragmentation and message integrity, ensuring secure and reliable data transmission. These updates safeguard interactions across the network, whether between IoT devices or in the cloud.

Performance Optimization

In addition to the querier, the new advanced publisher/subscriber mechanisms also improves data throughput and reliability. These optimizations enhance system performance while minimizing resource consumption, key to efficient IoT-to-cloud integration.

Technology Agnosticism

Zenoh 1.1.0 is committed to supporting diverse hardware and software platforms, including new features for QNX operating systems, highlights its technology-agnostic approach. This openness reduces dependence on specific vendors and encourages widespread adoption.

Future Market Enablement

Zenoh continues to foster innovation by bridging gaps in IoT-to-cloud operations. The new tool ZettaC2 (for Zetta Control Center) is now available on all operating systems. It has been made for monitoring and managing Zenoh systems. By simplifying complex interactions, it paves the way for emerging edge markets and collaborative data-sharing environments.

Zenoh 1.1.0 "Firesong" demonstrates how foundational values like openness, adaptability, security, and performance guide advancements in IoT-to-cloud ecosystems, delivering a system designed for the future.

Eclipse Zenoh can help to increase ICOS-feature related impact not only in the edge/fog computing domain, but also in the robotics, and SDV domain areas. Eclipse Zenoh has been selected as an alternative communication middleware for the ROS2 release, and a rmw_zenoh is under development to become a Tier-1 protocol for the ROS community (https://github.com/ros2/rmw_zenoh). In the SDV, Eclipse Zenoh was identified as the most appropriate protocol for V2X applications for autonomous and assisted driving in the IUT-T FGAI4AD-01 Automated driving safety data protocol – Specification (https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/opb/fg/T-FG-AI4AD-2022-PDF-E.pdf).