Link LDP Hello adjacency tracking with BFD

LDP can only track an LDP peer with which it established a link LDP session with using the Hello and Keep-Alive timers. If an IGP protocol registered with BFD on an IP interface to track a neighbor, and the BFD session times out, the next-hop for prefixes advertised by the neighbor are no longer resolved. This however does not bring down the link LDP session to the peer because the LDP peer is not directly tracked by BFD. More importantly the LSR-id of the LDP peer may not coincide with the neighbor’s router-id IGP is tracking by way of BFD.

To properly track the link LDP peer, LDP needs to track the Hello adjacency to its peer by registering with BFD. This way, the peer next-hop is tracked.

The user enables Hello adjacency tracking with BFD by enabling BFD on an LDP interface:

config>router>ldp>interface-parameters>interface>enable-bfd

The parameters used for the BFD session, that is, transmit-interval, recethat isinterval, and multiplier, are those configured under the IP interface in existing implementation:

config>router>interface>bfd

When multiple links exist to the same LDP peer, a Hello adjacency is established over each link but only a single LDP session will exist to the peer and will use a TCP connection over one of the link interfaces. Also, a separate BFD session should be enabled on each LDP interface. If a BFD session times out on a specific link, LDP will immediately bring down the Hello adjacency on that link. In addition, if the there are FECs which have their primary NHLFE over this link, LDP triggers the LDP FRR procedures by sending to IOM the neighbor/next-hop down message. This will result in moving the traffic of the impacted FECs to an LFA next-hop on a different link to the same LDP peer or to an LFA backup next-hop on a different LDP peer depending on the lowest backup cost path selected by the IGP SPF.

As soon as the last Hello adjacency goes down because of BFD timing out, the LDP session goes down and the LDP FRR procedures will be triggered. This will result in moving the traffic to an LFA backup next-hop on a different LDP peer.