6. Elements of Procedure

This section discusses the normative requirements of the protocol in order to achieve interoperability. It is important for implementors to enforce only the requirements specified in this section, as misguided pedantry has been proven by experience to affect interoperability adversely.

Remember that all references of the form "bfd.Xx" refer to internal state variables (defined in section 6.8.1), whereas all references to "the Xxx field" refer to fields in the protocol packets themselves (defined in section 4).