BFD is a detection protocol designed to provide fast forwarding path failure detection times for all media types, encapsulations, topologies, and routing protocols. In addition to fast forwarding path failure detection, BFD provides a consistent failure detection method for network administrators. Because the network administrator can use BFD to detect forwarding path failures at a uniform rate, rather than the variable rates for different routing protocol hello mechanisms, network profiling and planning will be easier, and reconvergence time will be consistent and predictable.
For complete information about the BFD feature, see the following documentation:
"Bidirectional Forwarding Detection"
You can enable BFD support for routing protocols at the router level to enable BFD support globally for all interfaces or you can configure BFD on a per-interface basis at the interface level.
For Cisco IOS Release 12.4(4)T, and later releases, you must configure BFD support for one or more of the following routing protocols: BGP, IS-IS, and OSPF.
This section describes the procedures for configuring BFD support for IS-IS, so that IS-IS is a registered protocol with BFD and will receive forwarding path detection failure messages from BFD. There are two methods for enabling BFD support for IS-IS:
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You can enable BFD for all of the interfaces for which IS-IS is routing by using the bfd all-interfaces command in router configuration mode. You can then disable BFD for one or more of those interfaces using the isis bfd disable command in interface configuration mode.
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You can enable BFD for a subset of the interfaces for which IS-IS is routing by using the isis bfd command in interface configuration mode.
IP event dampening introduces a configurable exponential delay mechanism to suppress the effects of excessive interface flapping events on routing protocols and routing tables in the network. This feature allows the network operator to configure a router to automatically identify and selectively dampen a local interface that is flapping, removing it from the network until it becomes stable again. Thus, the network becomes more stable, with a faster convergence time.
Tuning hello parameters should be considered only when the link type does not offer fast enough link failure detection. The standard default values for the hello interval and hello multiplier are 10 seconds and 3 seconds. Therefore, the multiplier times the interval will give a default hold-time of 30 seconds.
Although a slower hello interval saves bandwidth and CPU usage, there are some situations when a faster hello interval is preferred. In the case of a large configuration that uses Traffic Engineering (TE) tunnels, if the TE tunnel uses ISIS as the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP), and the IP routing process is restarted at the router at the ingress point of the network (headend), then all the TE tunnels get resignaled with the default hello interval. A faster hello interval prevents this resignaling. To configure a faster hello interval, you need to decrease the ISIS hello interval manually using the isis hello-intervalcommand.
Configuring a point-to-point adjacency over a broadcast media can improve convergence times of a customer's network because it prevents the system from electing a designated router (DR), prevents flooding from using CSNPs for database synchronization, and simplifies shortest path first (SPF) computations.