Protocol Comparison and Trade-offs for PLC-Digital Twin Communication

Mohammed Hlayel published a dataset on figshare in 2026 comparing communication protocols for industrial automation. The data supports a study evaluating a WebSocket–S7 bridge against MQTT, OPC UA, and Modbus for connecting Siemens PLCs to cloud-hosted digital twins. Performance metrics include round-trip times, latency under load, and error rates, assessed against the IEC 61588 standard.

Use Cases

• Benchmark communication protocol latency for industrial control systems based on the described round-trip time (RTT) comparisons.
• Evaluate protocol scalability for multi-user digital twin scenarios based on the emulated load tests with up to 40 concurrent users.
• Select a protocol for deterministic PLC-cloud interaction based on the performance analysis against the IEC 61588 timing threshold.
• Compare the overhead of broker-less versus broker-based architectures for wide-area network conditions based on the described protocol characteristics.

Strengths

• Performance metrics are benchmarked against a recognized industrial standard (IEC 61588).
• Provides specific, comparative latency figures: WebSocket–S7 achieved an average RTT of 87 ms, outperforming MQTT (133 ms), OPC UA (162 ms), and Modbus (194 ms).
• Scalability is tested under emulated multi-user loads, showing sub-100 ms response times for up to 40 concurrent users with near-zero error rates.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset is very small (5.5 KB), indicating limited scope, likely containing summary results rather than raw experimental data.

Provenance

Source

Mohammed Hlayel via figshare

Collection Method

Experimental validation using JMeter, Wireshark, and Unity Profiler on an AWS cloud backend.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-11 17:43:10; freshness should be verified.