A Unified Method to Design Bridges for OPC UA PubSub Networks in the Industrial IoT
Quang-Duy Nguyen, Saadia Dhouib, Patrick Bellot · 2022
Specification part 14 of the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard provides five different profiles to implement the publish-subscribe messaging pattern. The specification is also called OPC UA PubSub, and its profiles are called PubSub profiles. Two devices deployed with the same PubSub profile can exchange and collaborate; however, two devices deployed with two different PubSub profiles are unable to communicate. It is a limit for the Industry Internet of Things, a complex environment where there would be heterogeneous devices and networks. One approach to overcoming this issue is to use a bridge for the devices deployed with different PubSub profiles. In this sense, this paper provides a unified method to design bridges for OPC UA PubSub networks. The proof-of-concept experiment, also presented in this paper, is a use case of bridging PubSub broker-less and broker-based networks.