Cooperative TCP / BGP window management for stateful switchover

摘要

A system and method for performing stateful switchover with reduced data, such as only metadata about a TCP window state. The metadata comprises a size of TCP packets used to send BGP messages, and which of those have been acknowledged by a neighbor networking device. The networking device comprises a BGP module to establish a BGP session between the networking device and a neighbor networking device. An active transport module within the networking device synchronizes with a standby transport module within the networking device by sending the metadata. A fault detector within the networking device initiates a stateful switchover from the active transport module to the standby transport module responsive to detecting a failure of a process and/or processor. The standby transport module uses the metadata to determine stateful metadata for preserving current BGP and TCP sessions of the networking device with dummy TCP packets having the same size ad sent TCP packets and containing safe BGP message data.