Patent attributes
A method of performing bidirectional forwarding detection (BFD) by a hardware forwarding element that includes a set of ingress pipelines and a set of egress pipelines. Each ingress pipeline includes a packet generator. A packet generator in a first pipeline periodically generates a pair of packets to monitor the health of a particular egress link. The pair includes a BFD transmit packet and a BFD dummy transmit packet. The method forwards each dummy BFD transmit packet to a first egress pipeline and increments a counter at the first egress pipeline. Each BFD packet is transmitted through the particular egress link to a network node. BFD packets received from the network node are forwarded to the first egress pipeline and the value of the counter is rest. The method marks the particular egress link as failed when the value of the counter exceeds a predetermined threshold.
