OPC-UA in interoperability – a performance comparative testing

Interoperability is considered one of the main obstacles to the fully adoption of Industry4.0. Reference Architectures, like RAMI4.0, considering normal operation and maintenance of industrial equipment, paved the way to break that interoperability barrier and OPC-UA, in this context, is the reference communication protocol. This paper explores findings when performing a performance comparative study between OPC-UA and MQTT in an industrial application. The results shows that a lighter protocol brings advantages to direct applications when the data needs to be delivered fast and without a specific focus on the data structure.