Bidirectional Forwarding Detection according to RFC 5880 is a simple Hello protocol to detect the loss of a connection between two routers. Hello packets are sent by both routers at a set interval. If these Hello packets are not received within a certain interval, the connection is assumed to be broken. In combination with BGP, BFD allows broken connections to be detected more quickly, since the BFD timers can be significantly shorter than the BGP timers.
Adjusting the timer interval allows lost connections to be detected faster or slower. The lower the timer interval, the faster connection losses are detected.
Note:
- BFD supports IPv4 and IPv6.
- There is no echo mode.
- BFD is a protocol that requires significant system resources, CPU time and bandwidth. BFD is processed exclusively in software. Hardware processing is not supported for BFD.
- Setting the Hello to a very short interval may result in BFD flapping or the detection of false positives. If false positives occur, you should increase the Hello interval.
- We do not recommend setting the Hello interval at less than 250ms.
In LANconfig you configure BFD under .
- BFD operating
- Activates or deactivates BFD globally
