OPC UA over TSN Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 34.8% concentration at the top. The five leading filers hold 150 of the 431 records in scope, but the next 90 ranked companies split the remainder — a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants.
- Filing kept climbing through the last complete year. From 24 filings in 2021 to 38 in 2024, a 58% rise, even as 2020's peak of 41 suggests the field is cyclical rather than one-way.
- Transmission and processing classes dominate, control classes lag. H04L (digital transmission) touches 51.3% of records and G06F (data processing) 29.5%, while G05B (control & regulating systems) sits at just 17.6% — the control-loop side of determinism is comparatively under-claimed.
Filing growth compares 2021 (24 records) with 2024 (38) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 431 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
OPC UA over Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is the architecture industrial vendors are using to carry deterministic, publish-subscribe traffic over standard Ethernet instead of proprietary fieldbuses. The patent record here spans 431 published records filed between 2015 and mid-2026, capturing claims on information-model overhead, determinism tradeoffs, migration paths from legacy fieldbus, conformance testing and interoperability between OPC UA stacks and TSN schedulers. Patent families, not raw document counts, are the fairer unit for judging real filing activity because they strip out continuation filings and multi-jurisdiction duplicates.
Filing offices skew toward the United States, Europe and China, with WIPO PCT filings indicating the assignees pursuing broad multi-jurisdiction protection rather than single-market coverage. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025-2026 figures in any trend chart are still filling in and should not be read as a slowdown.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 431-record dataset: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend, 2017-2026
Filings ran 21 in 2017, peaked at 41 in 2020, then rebuilt from 24 in 2021 to 38 in 2024 — a 58% rise over that span. 2025 and 2026 figures are undercounted because of publication lag and should not be read as a decline.
IPC subclass composition
H04L (digital information transmission) covers 51.3% of the 431 records and G06F (electric digital data processing) 29.5%, reflecting the networking- and software-heavy nature of the field. G05B (control & regulating systems), the classification closest to the industrial control loop itself, appears in only 17.6% of records — a gap worth noting given the architecture's control-system purpose. Shares are computed against all 431 records and add to more than 100% because records carry multiple classes.
Shares are the percentage of the 431 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on OPC UA over TSN Deterministic Architecture with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about opc ua over tsn deterministic architecture and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative and most-cited filings
System operating using OPC UA, communication method using OPC UA, and load balancer
A system that operates using Open Platform Communications (OPC) Unified Architecture (UA) includes a redundant server set with an active and a standby OPC UA server, an OPC UA client that designates an endpoint URL, and a load balancer connected between the redundant server set and the client. The load balancer proxies the client's connection request to the active server, with the endpoint URL kept distinct from either server's own URL so failover can occur without the client renegotiating its address.Filed by Yokogawa Electric Corporation, published 2021-05-06 as US20210136143A1.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20190349392A1 | Time synchronization attack detection in a deterministic network | 182 |
| 2 | US6567840B1 | Task scheduling and message passing | 131 |
| 3 | US20190109872A1 | Intelligent automated security vulnerability detection and analysis for industrial internet of things (IIOT) … | 89 |
| 4 | US20140348140A1 | Modular deterministic communication terminal for remote systems | 78 |
| 5 | US6173207B1 | Real-time control system with non-deterministic communication | 70 |
| 6 | US20210243641A1 | Time-aware quality-of-service in communication systems | 61 |
| 7 | US20180088548A1 | Method and system for process controlling of plants in an OPC-UA based machine-to-machine network | 56 |
| 8 | US20060045020A1 | Message synchronization over a stochastic network | 55 |
| 9 | US20100135203A1 | MIMO communication system having deterministic communication path and antenna arrangement method therfor | 51 |
| 10 | US20040141517A1 | Industrial controller providing deterministic communication on Ethernet | 50 |
Citation counts favour older filings simply because they have had longer to accumulate citations inside this corpus; treat them as a signal of influence, not of current technical importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-throughs from the concentration, growth and citation figures above.
The top of the field is dense, the rest is open
The five leading assignees together hold 34.8% of all 431 records in scope, and the top 10 push that to 49.9%. That still leaves roughly half the corpus spread across 90+ other ranked companies, many with only a handful of filings — a long tail rather than a closed field.
Renewed filing after the 2020 peak
After peaking at 41 filings in 2020, activity dipped before climbing from 24 in 2021 to 38 in 2024 — a 58% rise over that three-year span. That pattern reads as a second wave of investment rather than a single early rush.
Security and scheduling anchor the citation graph
The most-cited record in scope addresses time synchronization attack detection in a deterministic network, cited 182 times; the next tier covers task scheduling and message passing, and IIoT security analysis. Citation weight sits with older foundational filings, a normal artefact of corpus age rather than a sign those problems are still unsolved.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to opc ua over tsn deterministic architecture, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the field is still open
The leader board is topped by a small set of established automation and networking vendors, but momentum has cooled across nearly all of them in the latest tracked year — a sign the current filing wave may be shifting toward newer entrants not yet visible in the ranking.
A single filer well ahead of fifth place
The leading assignee holds 67 records against 18 at fifth place and 11 at tenth — a steep drop-off that marks this as a leader-plus-field structure rather than an even spread among a handful of majors.
Leading filers show zero activity in the latest year
Several of the top-ranked assignees, including the current leader, show 0 filings in the latest tracked year and -100% year-on-year change. Given the 18-month publication lag, this is most plausibly a reporting gap rather than an actual halt in R&D.
Collaboration is limited and mostly intra-corporate
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear in the dataset, and the strongest are pairings between a parent company and its own subsidiary or named inventors rather than cross-company joint filings. Genuine inter-company collaboration on OPC UA/TSN determinism is not yet a visible pattern in the patent record.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Siemens | 0 | -100% |
| Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| Honeywell International Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| ABB Technology Ltd. | 0 | — |
| ABB (Schweiz) AG | 0 | -100% |
| Harmonic Inc. | 0 | — |
| NEC Corporation | 0 | — |
| SICPA Holding SA | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a field with a dense top tier and real gaps beneath it. Two directions follow from that.
Map the control-loop gap in detail
G05B coverage sits well below the transmission-layer classes, which suggests device-level determinism claims are less crowded than network-layer ones. A targeted claim search inside G05B against this same record set would clarify whether that gap is real or an artefact of classification practice.
Explore this branch in EurekaWatch the momentum reversal
Near-universal -100% year-on-year figures among leading filers, set against 18-month publication lag, mean the next 12-18 months of data will either confirm a real slowdown or correct itself as filings catch up. Re-running this analysis on that schedule is the only reliable way to tell which.
Track filings in EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
One assignee leads clearly with 67 of the 431 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked filer at 18. The top five filers combined hold 34.8% of all records, and the top ten hold 49.9%, which means roughly half the field is held by a long tail of smaller filers rather than by a handful of dominant players. The ranking covers 100 companies total, counted by record, so it is not a top-50 or top-100 list in the conventional sense but the full set the dataset returns.
Filings rose from 24 in 2021 to 38 in 2024, a 58% increase over that three-year span, after an earlier peak of 41 in 2020. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower, but that is expected: publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years are always undercounted at the time of measurement. Judged on the last complete year, 2024, the trend is upward, not downward.
Digital information transmission (IPC class H04L) appears in 51.3% of the 431 records, followed by electric digital data processing (G06F) at 29.5% and wireless communication networks (H04W) at 20.0%. Control and regulating systems (G05B), the class closest to the actual industrial control loop, appears in only 17.6% of records. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100% and should not be summed as if they were mutually exclusive categories.
The clearest gap sits in control-loop-specific determinism claims under G05B, which lags well behind the transmission- and processing-heavy classes despite being central to the architecture's industrial purpose. AI-assisted schedule optimization (G06N, 5.1% of records) and conformance or interoperability testing methods also show thinner coverage relative to the size of the overall field. These are areas where filing density is low enough that a well-drafted claim is less likely to run into dense prior art.
Citation counts in this dataset are useful but skew toward older filings simply because they have had more time to accumulate citations within the corpus being searched. The most-cited record here, on time synchronization attack detection in a deterministic network, has 182 citations, but that reflects years of accumulated reference, not that the underlying problem is still unresolved. Citation counts are best read as a signal of historical influence on later filings, not as a ranking of which technology matters most today.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
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Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.