Four things that cut across every protocol rather than belonging to one. Each answers a question you ask about a library before you commit to it.
- Glossary, what the words mean. CCSDS runs on acronyms, and 23 of the ones used most in these docs are never spelled out anywhere else.
- Verification, whether it is correct. Which claims rest on a published test vector, which rest on a reading of the standard, and what has never been tested against another implementation.
- Performance, whether it is fast enough. Measured rather than estimated, so you can tell whether a link rate is achievable before you build for it.
- Security, whether it is safe. The threat model for a library whose input arrives from a radio, and the resource limits each decoder enforces.
The conformance statements are the other half of the correctness picture: this section is the method, those are the clause-by-clause results.