OPC UA Implementation for Industrial Automation - Part 1: Evaluating the Performance of PubSub Model

OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is emerging as the leading technology for facilitating machine-to-machine (M2M) and machine-to-cloud (M2C) communications in the field of industrial automation. It provides a unified protocol that enables seamless data transfer from sensors to the cloud, making it a widely adopted standard. With the introduction of Part 14: Publisher and Subscriber (PubSub) to the OPC specification, M2M communication with a shared information model becomes possible, offering scalability and efficiency in data exchange between machines. In this view, this paper aims to evaluate the applicability of the newly introduced PubSub model for industrial communications. Specifically, this research focuses on analyzing the performance of the OPC UA stack using two different operating systems: Embedded Linux (open source) and VxWorks (proprietary RTOS). The performance metric utilized is the Round-trip time (RTT), which measures the time required for data to complete one closed loop. The experimental results show that OPC UA PubSub exhibits robust performance, indicating its suitability for real-time industrial use cases.