Performance Analysis of OPC UA for Industrial Interoperability towards Industry 4.0

Abstract

Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) incorporates a wide range of features and covers most of the requirements for a platform-independent interoperability standard which can be used to transmit data and information from the factory production floor to the enterprise and management level. Due to its highly scalable and interoperable architecture, it is well-positioned for future deployment in smart embedded devices towards Industry 4.0, especially in environments where there are heterogeneous communication nodes. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the performance of OPC UA for communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments to better understand the technical implementation of OPC UA and the feasibility of incorporating OPC UA directly to resource-constrained edge devices. We propose an architectural system framework for OPC UA performance evaluation across a wide range of experiments. Our experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed system and evaluation framework. The OPC UA-based IIoT system architecture and budget-friendly/cost-effective testbed setup can be flexibly adopted for protocol testing, prototyping and educational purposes.