TransBridge: A Transparent Communication Middleware with Unified RoCE and TCP Semantics

In low-latency edge-intelligence scenarios such as autonomous driving and industrial edge analytics, the processing of large-scale sensor data imposes extremely stringent requirements on communication latency. However, the high overhead of the traditional TCP protocol makes it difficult to satisfy such demands, while the semantic gap between the high-performance RoCE protocol and the standard Socket API prevents existing applications from directly exploiting its advantages. To address this problem, this paper proposes TransBridge, a lightweight user-space communication middleware that transparently bridges TCP and RoCE. Its design is realized through three key innovations: a transparent user-space compatibility architecture that enables unmodified Socket-based applications to benefit from RoCE performance; a microsecond-level low-latency transmission engine that bypasses kernel and protocol stack overhead; and a lightweight lock-free resource management mechanism based on a decentralized peer-to-peer architecture and deferred buffer updates. Experiments on a real RoCE network show that TransBridge significantly outperforms mainstream schemes: it achieves an average round-trip latency of 5.926 μs for 16 B messages and a throughput of 20.254 Gbps for 16 KB messages; in the Fast DDS application-level evaluation, it achieves a throughput of 188 Mbps and an average round-trip latency of about 150 μs. The results indicate that TransBridge can provide transparent and effective RoCE acceleration for existing Socket-based applications in resource-constrained edge environments.