Industrial Internet of Things Gateway with OPC UA Based on Sitara AM335X with ModbusE Acquisition Cycle Performance Analysis

Cornel Ventuneac; Vasile Gheorghita Gaitan

doi:10.3390/s24072072

Industrial Internet of Things Gateway with OPC UA Based on Sitara AM335X with ModbusE Acquisition Cycle Performance Analysis

Sensors (Basel). 2024 Mar 24;24(7):2072. doi: 10.3390/s24072072.

Authors

Cornel Ventuneac¹, Vasile Gheorghita Gaitan^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stefan cel Mare University, 720229 Suceava, Romania.
² Integrated Center for Research, Development and Innovation in Advanced Materials, Nanotechnologies and Distributed Systems for Fabrication and Control (MANSiD), Stefan cel Mare University, 720229 Suceava, Romania.

Abstract

This article presents the hardware and software architectures used to implement the Modbus Extension (ModbusE) IIoT gateway, the performance of the acquisition cycle at the PRU real-time programmable core level, the acquisition cycle communication flow-dispatcher-OPC UA server (Linux)-OPC UA client (Windows) as well as the performance analysis of data communications between the IIoT ModbusE gateway and the OPC UA client (Windows). In order to be able to implement both the ModbusE acquisition cycle and the OPC UA server, the BeagleBone Black Board was chosen as the hardware platform. This board uses the Sitara AM335x processor (Texas Instruments (TI), Dallas, TX, USA) from Texas Instruments. Thus, the acquisition cycle was implemented on the PRU0 real-time core, and the OPC UA server, running under the Linux operating system, was implemented on the ARM Cortex A8 processor. From the analysis of the communication speed of the messages between the OPC UA client and the ModbusE servers, it was found that the ModbusE acquisition cycle speed was higher than the acquisition speed of the OPC UA client.

Keywords: IIoT gateway; ModbusE; OPC UA; PRU; System on Chip; acquisition cycle.

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the NetZeRoCities Competence Center, funded by the European Union–NextGenerationEU and the Romanian Government under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan for Romania, contract no. 760007/30.12.2022 with the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalisation through the specific research project P2-Sustainable energy & environments.