Towards Performance Benchmarking of Cyclic OPC UA PubSub over TSN

PubSub is a recent introduction to a widely-accepted industrial communication protocol OPC UA. It is driven by OPC Foundation Field eXchange group (ex-FLC, ex-Shapers) to enable real-time OPC UA over TSN for cyclic communication in industrial automation. Furthermore, evolution of Soft Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) to Virtual PLCs entails a wider use of software stacks and applications expected to provide necessary level of performance, which might be influenced by various configuration options of the application, the OPC UA stack, and the underlying operating system. In this work we address this issue with an experimental setup for benchmarking of cyclic PubSub applications using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and a state-of-the-art open-source OPC UA PubSub stack. Experimental results show achievable jitter and cycle times for different message sizes, SDK options, and OS configurations.