Explains how BFD provides low-overhead, fast failure detection between adjacent forwarding engines across different media and protocol layers.
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) provides low-overhead, fast detection of failures between adjacent forwarding engines. You can use BFD as a single failure-detection method across media types and protocol layers, with a wide range of detection times and overhead. Fast failure detection lets the router respond quickly to a failed link or neighbor.
Prerequisites for implementing BFD
Lists the software, protocol, platform, and neighbor support requirements needed before enabling BFD in different deployment scenarios.
Guidelines for implementing BFD
Describes ACL, port, and ICMPv6 considerations that affect BFD session establishment and operation for BGP environments.
Restrictions for implementing BFD
Provides platform, feature, timer, and interoperability limitations that apply to BFD sessions, including echo mode, bundle behavior, and profile constraints.
Information about BFD
Explains core BFD operating behavior, including packet timing, failure detection, priority handling, bundle operation, dampening, hardware offload, and multipath support.
BFD hardware offload support for IPv4
Describes how IPv4 BFD hardware offload improves scale and convergence by moving session processing to hardware and reporting resource exhaustion through syslog messages.
BFD hardware offload support for IPv6
Explains how IPv6 BFD hardware offload improves failure detection scale and convergence while outlining support limitations for dampening and bundle operation.
Base configuration for BFD
Explains how to establish core BFD configuration and enable fast failure detection under routing protocols or static routes before applying protocol-specific settings.
BFD over bundles
Enables IETF-mode fast failure detection for link-aggregation member links on a per-bundle basis.
BFD echo mode
Describes how BFD echo mode uses fast-rate echo packets on physical interfaces to improve link failure detection, while noting default behavior and session-scale limitations for IPv4 single-hop deployments.
Host multipath BFD sessions
Describes how multipath Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) sessions can be hosted on user-specified line cards per VRF, and explains the impact on operational resiliency and tenant isolation in multi-tenant networks.
Monitoring and verification of BFD
Describes how to verify BFD session health, inspect packet statistics, identify anomalies, and reset counters for ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting.
Feature-specific integrations for BFD
Describes how BFD integrates with specialized transport and forwarding environments such as MPLS TE, VXLAN, BVI, and PWHE, along with related platform-specific features and operational considerations.
Associated RFCs
Lists the RFC documents that define the standards and specifications for BFD.
Technical assistance
Lists Cisco Technical Support resources for technical content, product information, and tools.