Comparative assessment of different OPC UA open–source stacks for embedded systems

With the rise of Industry 4.0 and of the Industrial Internet, the computing and communication infrastructures achieved an essential role within process and factory automation, and cyberphysical systems in general. In this scenario, the OPC UA standard is currently becoming a widespread opportunity to enable interoperability among heterogeneous industrial systems. Nonetheless, OPC UA is characterized by a complex protocol architecture, that may impair the scalability of applications and may represent a bottleneck for its effective implementation in resource-constrained devices, such as low-cost industrial embedded systems. Several different OPC UA implementations are available, which in some significant cases are released under an open source license. In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the performance provided by some of these different OPC UA implementations, focusing specifically on potential development and resource bottlenecks. The analysis is carried out through an extensive experimental campaign explicitly targeting general purpose low-cost embedded systems. The final goal is to provide a comprehensive performance comparisons to allow devising some useful practical guidelines.