A Comparative Study to Evaluate the Performance of Communication Protocols for Process Industry

Abstract

With the boom of Industry 4.0 for industrial automation, the data exchange between the different industrial devices has tremendously increased through local (edge) and cloud computing. Nowadays, several communication protocols are available to realize data acquisition in the industry. As a result, understanding the practical capabilities of each communication protocol arises as an essential issue in optimizing the data acquisition and storage in industrial plants. This study aims to develop a software-based test environment to evaluate the performance of two widely used communication protocols within the scope of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These contemplated protocols are Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). With the help of the developed test environment, several performance metrics, like packet overhead, latency, packet loss ratio, and CPU utilization, are evaluated for different application scenarios where the varying number of clients and subscribers are considered. Derived results indicate the stronger parts of each protocol under varying communication configurations.