The BFD Working Group standardizes the Bi-directional Forwarding Detection protocol specified in RFC 5880 and its related documents. BFD is typically used by "client protocols" in order to provide sub-second continuity verification, typically augmenting much slower protocols. An example of this is providing sub-second detection of link failures for IGPs (Interior Gateway Protocols). A "seamless" version of BFD, S-BFD, is specified in RFC 7880 and its extensions to provide for BFD functionality in environments where endpoints are potentially unknown to each other.
New work under consideration for BFD includes:
- Refining client protocol semantics for BFD liveness vs. protocol liveness in BGP and OSPF.
- Considering BFD for the Geneve transport protocol.
- Optimized authentication procedures to permit authentication to be used with high granularity session timers.
- Validation of path MTU over the links utilized by a BFD session.
- Providing RFC 5880/5881 services without explicit IP endpoint configuration.
and finally:
- Considering whether it's time to extend BFD to provide a more general framework for carrying additional information.
The status of the Working Group is always available at https://trac.ietf.org/trac/bfd/wiki
[Last Updated: March 19, 2019]