Cisco Systems Cisco Systems This document describes the motivation for benchmarking the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol. The BFD protocol is a relatively new protocol intended to detect failures in the bidirectional path between two network elements, with potentially very low latency [BFD, BFD-GEN]. The BFD protocol is being implemented by several vendors and is being deployed extensively by the service providers. Hence, it is imperative that common understanding is established for performance and conformance benchmarks as well as interoperability. This draft seeks to generate interest on this topic in the working group. If there is sufficient interest on this topic, drafts that address the Methodology and Terminology for the BFD protocol could be proposed; before BMWG could make this an official working group item.