Wireless IoT meets industrial interoperability
The OPC Foundation is expanding OPC UA connectivity into two fast-growing IoT ecosystems: LoRaWAN and Matter. With the protocol-to-OPC UA mappings now completed, the OPC Foundation’s connectivity reference implementation, the UA Edge Translator, supports OPC UA, LoRaWAN, and Matter, alongside additional protocols.
As Erich Barnstedt, Senior Director and Architect for Industrial Standards at Microsoft, puts it: “Combining IoT ecosystems is one of my favorite exercises! It allows one ecosystem to benefit from the other, creating a win-win situation for both.”
What is the UA Edge Translator?
The UA Edge Translator is an industrial connectivity edge reference application that translates from proprietary protocols to OPC UA, leveraging W3C Web of Things (WoT) Thing Descriptions via the WoT-Connectivity specification. Thing Descriptions can be edited easily using the Eclipse Foundation’s edi{TD}or.
How it works
UA Edge Translator addresses the classic brownfield challenge: connecting disparate industrial assets with proprietary interfaces and translating their data into an OPC UA information model, ideally aligned with standardized companion specifications. This enables processing at the edge or in the cloud using a normalized, IEC standard OPC UA data format.
Instead of normalizing data later in the cloud, mappings are defined at the edge using the WoT Thing Description schema (JSON-LD-based). The schema delivery mechanism also leverages OPC UA, so OPC UA is used for both the control plane and the data plane for industrial connectivity, where previous approaches often combined OPC UA for data with a proprietary REST interface for control.
Why it matters
Industrial environments rarely run on a single standard. Adding LoRaWAN and Matter helps organizations bring long-range, low-power sensor networks and interoperable smart-device ecosystems into industrial and OT architectures where OPC UA is already widely used.
Practical impact
With this update, integrators and solution teams can connect heterogeneous device fleets at the edge and expose them through a standardized OPC UA layer, making it easier to unify data access across IT and OT systems, scale deployments without one-off protocol integrations, and enable control workflows through existing OPC UA client stacks, including cloud-edge solutions and industrial platforms.
Want to see how LoRaWAN or Matter devices can be surfaced as OPC UA for your specific use case? Get in contact with us and take a look at the UA Edge Translator on GitHub: https://github.com/OPCFoundation/UA-EdgeTranslator