The header content and message layouts for both NetworkMessages and DataSetMessages in different message mappings were designed to be flexible and to support different use cases by enabling or disabling individual fields within the headers. The header layouts only apply to NetworkMessages with DataSetMessages.

While this flexibility makes it possible to support many different use cases with PubSub, the number of possible header field combinations also increases the effort needed for the implementation and verification. On the other hand, within a given application domain or for different use cases some configurations might be more appropriate than others. The header layouts described in this section intend to find a reasonable set of header options to provide a compromise between flexibility, interoperability and optimized support for different use cases.

Custom configurations for the possible header field combinations can be used but they should be limited to applications that do not fall into the use cases described for the following layouts.