Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for BGP

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protection of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) peering sessions allows for the rapid detection of link failures such that peering sessions can be taken out of the "established" state within fractions of a second. This allows the protocol to select an alternate path (if available) to a destination immediately after the link failure, rather than waiting until the BGP hold timer expires (180 seconds by default).

This feature applies to both IPv4 and IPv6 peering sessions. Both IPv6 global and link local peering sessions are supported.

Limitations

The BFD setting can be applied on a per-peer basis, but the ability to set BFD on a peer-group or address-family basis is not currently supported.
The BGP peer must be in the disabled admin state to modify its BFD setting.
While BFD can be enabled on any BGP peering session, protection is only provided for directly connected EBGP peering sessions.

Published March 2020prev | next

Email this topic

Print this page Print this page

Leave feedback Feedback