Performance evaluation of industrial OPC UA gateway with energy cost-saving

Abstract

OPC UA is an international standard that defines communication technology and data processing method in smart factory. Many industry standards and protocols accept the OPC UA specification. Therefore, OPC UA plays an important role in Smart Factory by supporting high interoperability among various protocols. ARM processors are typical CPUs and are used in many embedded systems due to their structural simplicity and low power consumption. However, existing plants still use x86 processors with high power consumption and price. Today, changing from smart factories to new processors has high entry barriers due to the huge cost and lack of experiments taking into account realistic indicators. Therefore, in this paper, we propose OPC UA Gateway that accommodates OPC UA specification on industrial device platform based on ARM processor. We evaluate performance based on indicators such as Publish Interval, Sampling Interval, Subscription Restriction, Encryption and Security Guidelines. Our experimental results show about 66% reduction in operating costs compared to x86 processors.