The UADP message mapping uses optimized OPC UA Binary encoding defined in OPC 10000-6 and provides message security for OPC UA PubSub. The available protocol mappings are defined in 7.3.

The UADP message mapping defines different optional header fields, variations of field settings and different DataSetMessage types and data encodings. Available layouts with standard settings and the corresponding URI Strings for UADP are defined in A.2.

Some optional fields like timestamps provide information that is not necessary for the processing of the messages on the Subscriber side. Other optional fields like PublisherId, DataSetWriterId or sizes of DataSetMessages are typically necessary for the processing of messages in generic Subscribers. If such fields are not present, the Subscriber must know the missing information from the DataSetReader configuration. One scenario is that a Publisher is sending NetworkMessages with a fixed layout of the payload. In this case the DataSetWriterId, the offset and size of the DataSetMessages is known from the DataSetReader configuration. The identification is done in this case by the group header with the WriterGroupId and NetworkMessageNumber. The UADP-Periodic-Fixed header layout for this scenario is defined in A.2.1.

The flexibility of the optional fields is necessary to support different use cases but it also allows the configuration of invalid combinations. To reduce the number of combinations used in common use cases, Annex A defines standard UADP header layouts with defined settings for common use cases. Custom configurations can be used but they should be limited to applications that do not fall into these use cases.

A Publisher should support all variations it allows through configuration. The required set of features is defined through profiles in OPC 10000-7.

A Subscriber shall be able to process all possible NetworkMessages and shall be able to skip information the Subscriber is not interested in. The Subscriber may not support all security policies. The capabilities related to processing different DataSet encodings is defined in OPC 10000-7.

The fields in the following protocol definition tables are encoded using the OPC UA Binary encoding rules defined in OPC 10000-6 including arrays. If the brackets for an array are not empty, the length field is omitted from the encoding and the length information is provided through additional definitions.