Taxonomy of Communication Requirements for Large-scale Multicast Applications

The intention of this memo is to define a classification system for the communication requirements of any large-scale multicast application (LSMA). It is very unlikely one protocol can achieve a compromise between the diverse requirements of all the parties involved in any LSMA. It is therefore necessary to understand the worst-case scenarios in order to minimize 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. Standardizing the way that applications define their requirements is a necessary step towards this. Classification is a first step towards standardization.