Towards an Industrial Converged Network with OPC UA PubSub and TSN

Technologies such as TSN and OPC UA are enablers for converged networks in industrial applications. TSN enables the coexistence of network traffic with real-time requirements and best-effort requirements. On the other hand, OPC UA defines a common information model in addition to secure communication, scalability, and platform independence. The new specification of OPC UA PubSub enables the possibility of implementing OPC UA on the lower levels of the automation pyramid, the field level. Therefore, combining these two technologies can in principle be implemented for every vertical and horizontal communication. This document analyzes the state of the art of OPC UA over TSN and explains the first steps towards an easy to use proof-of-concept for a converged network that is also designed to be a testbed. The testbed will be used to evaluate the interoperability of TSN-capable devices from different vendors. In addition to that, different OPC UA PubSub implementations will be used and benchmarked. These future results will present an overview of the currently available products and provides hands-on experiences for practical implementations of converged networks.