.. _Message-Bus:

===========
Message Bus
===========

The VOLTTRON message bus is the mechanism responsible for enabling communication between agents, drivers, and platform
instances.  The message bus supports communication using the :ref:`Publish/Subscribe Paradigm <VIP-Overview>` and
:ref:`JSON RPC <Remote-Procedure-Calls>`.
Currently VOLTTRON may be configured to use either Zero MQ or RabbitMQ messaging software to perform messaging.

To standardize message bus communication, VOLTTRON implements VIP - VOLTTRON Interconnect Protocol.  VIP defines
patterns for pub/sub communication as well as JSON-RPC, and allows for the creation of agent communication subsystems.

For more information on messaging, VIP, multi-platform communication and more, please explore the message bus
documentation linked below:


.. toctree::
    :caption: Message Bus Topics

    topics
    vip/vip-overview
    rabbitmq/rabbitmq-overview
    multi-platform/multi-platform-communication