A performance and cost evaluation of combining OPC-UA and Microsoft Azure IoT Hub into an industrial Internet-of-Things system

The expected monetary costs and response time performance is important information to know before deploying an industrial Internet-of-Things system. The system investigated in this paper is built up by combining the Open Plant Communication Universal Architecture and the Microsoft Azure Internet-of-Things Hub. We consider a real life industrial scenario that remotely monitors a piece of industrial equipment consisting of 1500 sensors, of which 600 update their values every second. The measured results show that the response times for a fiber based Internet connection was on average 770 ms with a standard deviation of 330 ms and the same measurements on a mobile internet connection was on average 1150 ms with a standard deviation of 340 ms. Cost wise, the investigated scenario fits within the most expensive price plan for the IoT hub and ends in a total of just over $5000 per month for the whole cloud service.