A method of communicating between a plurality of modules on a vehicle, each module configured as a publisher or subscriber node that communicate in the operation of the autonomous vehicle utilizing a shared memory communication system. The method may include generating groups of messages by publisher nodes, each group associated with a unique topic and generated by a single publisher node associated with the unique topic, writing a group of messages in a message buffer associated with a single topic, writing in a registry, location information indicating where the messages were written, reading new message information from the registry, the new message information indicative of whether a new message associated with a particular topic is available, reading location information indicating where the new message is stored if a new message is available, and reading the new message from the respective message buffer.