Recently OPC Foundation announces OPC UA PubSub release as important extension of OPC UA communication platform. Will it have an advantage on IEC 61850 integration with OPC Pub over other IoT Protocols ?
Looking for Expert Opinion on this topic?
I think so, judging about the statement: " Release of the OPC UA PubSub specification is significant because it broadly extends the use-cases where adoption of OPC UA is feasible and preferable.
PubSub fully integrates into the existing OPC UA technology but enables further adoption of OPC UA at the deepest levels of the shop-floor where controllers, sensors, and embedded devices typically require optimized, low power and low-latency communications on local networks."
https://opcconnect.opcfoundation.org/2018/04/opc-foundation-announces-opc-ua-pubsub-release/
It all comes down to your application requirements.
Each protocol family has a "sweet spot" when it is applied in the situation where it provides the services required by the application. The OPC family of protocols were designed for factory automation applications and they tend to work well when used that way. They also tend to work well for sharing data between non-time-critical functions once the data is gathered from devices that perform time-critical functions.
The MMS-based functionality used by IEC 61850 has some similar heritage (based on a factory automation background), but was designed to meet a different set of functional requirements. For some applications, both families do "well enough" to meet the functional requirements and will work more or less interchangeably. For some applications, one or the other will introduce a limitation.
The IEC 61850 architecture includes an abstraction between the data and protocols, so potentially IEC 61850 design concepts could be used over any protocol that supports the required base functions. However, to date, there has been a lot of pressure to stick with the initially-defined mapping of the abstract service layer to MMS. There is consideration being given to also defining a mapping to XMPP for use over the Internet, but this is yet to be materialized.
It generally takes a lot of understanding (which typically takes time to acquire) to appreciate where and when different protocols might or might not be suitable.
Once you start looking at IoT protocols, you open the door to a wider range of choices. So far, very few of them seem to provide the functional and integrity capabilities that are provided by the protocols specifically designed for power industry applications.
While we kind of endorse the view from Andrew West, some aspects are important to notice:
"PubSub enables the use of OPC UA directly over the Internet (Wide Area Networks) by utilizing popular data transports like MQTT and AMQP while retaining its key OPC UA end-to-end security and standardized data modeling advantages. "
-Directly over Internet has a definite advantage of working with Cloud.
"Similarly, PubSub also enables use of the User Data Protocol (UDP) for establishing low-latency, loss tolerating connections on LANs."
-Low latency is the key to industrial and power applications still reliability is important.
Over TSN tunnel is also seen as an approach to make sure it aligns to TSN as an important aspect. This builds on determinism. Closed loop considerations could use it.
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