Bidirectional Forwarding Detection(BFD)
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is a network protocol used to detect faults between two forwarding engines. It provides low-overhead detection of faults even on physical media that don't support failure detection of any kind, such as ethernet, virtual circuits, tunnels and MPLS LSPs. BFD establishes a session between two endpoints over a particular link. If more than one link exists between two systems, multiple BFD sessions may be established to monitor each one of them. The session is established with a three-way handshake, and is torn down the same way. Authentication may be enabled on the session. A choice of simple password, MD5 or SHA1 authentication is available. BFD does not have a discovery mechanism; sessions must be explicitly configured between endpoints. BFD may be used on many different underlying transport mechanisms and layers, and operates independently of all of these. Therefore, it needs to be encapsulated by whatever transport it uses. For example, moni