Performance evaluation of OPC UA

The widespread use of standard, worldwide and vendor-independent OPC UA specifications in industrial environment introduces many benefits as it allows to keep open the market of the industrial applications. On the other hand, OPC UA adopts a very complex software infrastructure to realise the data exchange between industrial applications and devices (e.g. mainframes, PLC, microcontroller); this complexity may impact on the overall performance of the communication between industrial applications. The aim of this paper is to deal with the performance evaluation of OPC UA, pointing out all the main features which could influence performance in the client/server exchange of information.