Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is therefore necessary to understand the worst-case scenarios in order to minimise the range of protocols needed. Dynamic protocol adaptation is likely to be necessary which will require logic to map particular combinations of requirements to particular mechanisms. Standardising the way that applications define their requirements is a necessary step towards this.
Classification is a first step towards standardisation.
This taxonomy consists of a large number of parameters that are considered useful for description of communication requirements of LSMAs. To describe a particular application, each parameter would be assigned a value. Typical ranges of values are given wherever possible. Failing this, the type of any possible values is given. The parameters are collected into ten or so higher level categories, but this is purely for convenience.