Scalability of OPC-UA down to the chip level enables “Internet of Things”

Abstract

Many implementations of the OPC-UA are increasingly available. Until now, use of technologies like the OPC-UA was limited to embedded systems with a sufficient amount of memory resources. OPC-UA offers a scalable feature set that could be tailored according to application demands. We believe that a key to successfully enable Internet of Things for the industrial automation applications lies in bringing down the OPC-UA into low end resource-limited devices, such as sensors. Because the OPC-UA provides a powerful information representation that is exchangeable through interoperable services. This paper has investigated the OPC-UA as a middleware solution for such resource-limited devices. For a proof of concept we have implemented an OPC-UA server based on the “Nano Embedded Device Server profiles” of the OPC Foundation.