Patent ID: 8665699

Claim:
An apparatus configured to operate as an OpenFlow switch, comprising: one or more OpenFlow virtual ports operative to generate outgoing link failure detection packets; a transmitter operative to periodically send the outgoing link failure detection packets on one or more links, each link being used to carry traffic to a peer OpenFlow switch; a receiver operative to receive incoming link failure detection packets, from each peer OpenFlow switch, over the one or more links; a link failure detection unit operative to monitor the reception of incoming link failure detection packets and further operative to determine that a link has failed if incoming link failure detection packets have not been received on that link for a predetermined interval; and a link failover unit operative to redirect traffic intended for a failed link to a backup link in response to a determination of a link failure; wherein the link failure detection packets comprise Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) packets; wherein the one or more links comprise Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) tunnels, and wherein the BFD packets are carried using the MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP); wherein the BFD packets are generated with a Generic Associated Channel Label (GAL) by an Open Flow virtual port and have an Associated Channel header (ACH), an ACH Type-Length-Value (TLV) header, and one or more ACH TLVs inserted by a field modifying virtual port.