Most (probably all) of the data pre-processing will happen on the PLC as part of the system control - conversion from analog to engineering values, smoothing, filtering, and averaging of sensor data happens natively at each sensor function block. The PLC uses two dedicated cores on the IPC - one for the primary PLC runtime, one for ethercat communications to remote IO. The other two cores running the IPC OS will handle all other processes including communication. The IPC OS (modified ubuntu-debian) is what will be interacting with the exposed PLC Data Layer, and then transmitting that data as appropriate to the UMH system. There is close to zero overhead for comms between the PLC and the IPC as they are on the same silicon. If MQTT is the correct answer to "how does the IPC OS transmit data to and from the rest of the UMH system" that's cool, and I'll work with that.