OPC UA Shared-Memory: Conceptual Elaboration and Prototypical Implementation Using Iceoryx2

2026-06-19

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of achieving low-latency, highly deterministic communication for edge devices in OT/IT convergence scenarios, where existing middleware struggles to balance semantic information modeling with performance. The authors propose a shared-memory-based extension to OPC UA communication, integrating the Iceoryx2 shared memory mechanism into the OPC UA transport layer within a microservices architecture—an approach introduced here for the first time. Evaluation of the prototype system demonstrates that this method significantly reduces communication latency compared to conventional TCP-based solutions while preserving OPC UA’s semantic capabilities. The results establish a high-performance communication pathway for OT/IT integration and highlight promising directions for further optimization.

Abstract

The increasing virtualization of automation software leads to a growing co-location of heterogeneous applications on shared edge devices and fosters modern microservice architectures. As a result, traditional OT software and modern IT-driven higher-level automation applications are increasingly executed on the same host system, enabling improved synergy and more efficient interaction between these domains. This development imposes strict requirements on the underlying communication infrastructure, particularly regarding latency and determinism. At the same time, there is a lack of middleware solutions that address these requirements while incorporating modern concepts such as standardized semantic information models. Building on prior work, this paper further develops a previously proposed concept of extending the OPC UA communication model for microservice-based applications and suggests the use of shared-memory as a transport mechanism for optimized intra-host communication. In addition, a first prototypical implementation based on a modified OPC UA library using Iceoryx2 is presented and evaluated in a proof-of-concept study by measuring function call latencies on the user level and comparing them to the original TCP-based OPC UA implementation. The results show consistently lower latencies for the shared-memory approach, while also indicating remaining optimization potential due to current implementation constraints.

Problem

• OPC UA
• shared-memory
• microservice
• latency
• determinism

Innovation

• OPC UA
• shared-memory
• Iceoryx2
• microservices
• low-latency communication