Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is a mechanism used by the routing protocols to quickly realize the reachability
failures to their neighbors. When BFD detects a reachability status change of a neighbor, clients are notified immediately.
Sometimes it might be critical to minimize changes in routing tables so as not to impact convergence, in case of any micro
failure. An unstable link that flaps excessively can cause other devices in the network to consume substantial system processing
resources, and it can cause routing protocols to lose synchronization with the state of the flapping link.
The BFD Dampening feature introduces a configurable exponential delay mechanism to suppress the excessive effect of remote
node reachability events flapping with BFD. The BFD Dampening feature allows the network operator to automatically dampen
a given BFD session to prevent excessive notification to the BFD clients, thus preventing unnecessary instability in the network.
Dampening the notification to a BFD client suppresses BFD notification until the session under monitoring stops flapping and
becomes stable.
Configuring the BFD Dampening feature, especially on a high-speed interface with routing clients, improves the convergence
time and stability throughout the network. BFD dampening can be applied to all types of BFD sessions, including IPv4/single-hop/multihop,
Multiprotocol Label Switching-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP), and Pseudo Wire (PW) Virtual Circuit Connection Verification (VCCV).
You can configure the BFD Dampening feature at the BFD template level (both single-hop and multihop templates). Dampening
is applied to all the sessions that use the BFD template. If you do not want a session to be dampened, you should use a new
BFD template without dampening for the new session. By default, the dampening functionality is not enabled on a template.