When using BGP over Switched Virtual Circuit (SVC) subnetworks it may be desirable to minimize traffic generated by BGP. Specifically, it may be desirable to eliminate traffic associated with periodic KEEPALIVE messages. BGP includes a mechanism for operation over switched virtual circuit (SVC) services which avoids keeping SVCs permanently open and allows it to eliminates periodic sending of KEEPALIVE messages.
This section describes how to operate without periodic KEEPALIVE messages to minimise SVC usage when using an intelligent SVC circuit manager. The proposed scheme may also be used on "permanent" circuits, which support a feature like link quality monitoring or echo request to determine the status of link connectivity.
The mechanism described in this section is suitable only between the BGP speakers that are directly connected over a common virtual circuit.