Assessment of Different OPC UA Industrial IoT solutions for Distributed Measurement Applications

The Industrial IoT scenario represents an interesting opportunity for distributed measurements systems, that are typically based on efficient and reliable communication systems, as well as the widespread availability of data from measurement instruments and/or sensors. The Open Platform Communications (OPC) Unified Architecture (UA) protocol is designed to ensure interoperability between heterogeneous sensors and acquisition systems, given its object–oriented structure allowing a complete contextualization of the information. Stemming from the intrinsic complexity of OPC UA, we designed an experimental measurement setup to carry out a meaningful performance assessment of its main open source implementations. The aim is to characterize the impact of the adoption of this protocol stack in a DMS in terms of both latency and power consumption, and to provide a general yet accurate and reproducible measurement setup.