Abstract
Organizations are increasingly prioritizing network availability and minimizing downtime due to the growing demand for online applications and services. Maintaining high availability can be costly, but a lack can damage an organization's reputation and cause significant financial losses. To enhance IP network availability, the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) is a necessary protocol that is used to achieve this goal. HSRP is a redundancy protocol that is used to manage network default gateway routers by using one or more redundant routers that will take over in case of default router failure. However, late failure detections and slow responses can lead to packet loss during failure. Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is an effective solution to increase availability by rapidly detecting link failure and monitoring IP connectivity. In our work, we implemented BFD with HSRP to reduce downtime and enhance the availability of the IP networks. The comparison was made based on convergence time, packet loss, CPU usage, and bandwidth consumption and after implementation, testing, and optimization and using the PNETLAB emulation tool. We have verified that HSRP with BFD shows very fast failure detection and recovery with reduced downtime and packet loss, thus improving network reliability and stability.