The Generic Routing Encapsulation (“GRE”) protocol can be used to establish a tunnel between two devices on a computer network. The tunnel can be a virtual data link between the two devices, and it can be created by encapsulating one data packet inside another data packet and by adding additional tunnel packet headers. One common type of GRE tunnel is IP-in-IP, in which Internet Protocol (“IP”) packets are encapsulated inside other IP packets. Another common type of GRE tunnel is PPP-over-IP, in which Point to Point (“PPP”) packets are encapsulated inside IP packets.
One application for GRE tunnels is Mobile IP, which allows a mobile node to move among IP subnets. Mobile IP supports using GRE to create an IP-in-IP tunnel between a home agent and a foreign agent. Packets addressed to a mobile node are first routed to the home agent, which then forwards the packet through the tunnel to the foreign agent. The foreign agent then provides the packet to the mobile node.
Another application for GRE tunnels is Virtual Private Networks (“VPNs”). In a VPN, the Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (“PPTP”) can be used to establish a PPP over IP tunnel between two endpoints. The PPP over IP tunnel connects the two endpoints, which are located on private networks, via a public network. PPTP uses a variety of GRE to establish the tunnel.
GRE tunnels can be unidirectional or bi-directional. Additionally, GRE tunnels can terminate at different endpoints (e.g., IP addresses) than the associated tunnel signaling. For example, Mobile IP signaling can be used between a tunnel initiator and a first endpoint IP address in order to establish a GRE tunnel to a second endpoint IP address.
Ongoing signaling transactions in a GRE tunnel do not generally provide reachability and liveness of the endpoints. Therefore, one GRE endpoint would not be able to determine the reachability and liveness of the other endpoint. As an example, an establishing endpoint can establish a GRE tunnel with a receiving endpoint, and the establishing endpoint can send messages through the tunnel to the receiving endpoint. If the receiving GRE endpoint crashes, it would not send error messages back to the establishing GRE endpoint. The establishing GRE endpoint can continue to send packets to the receiving endpoint, which would be silently discarded by the network for an indeterminable period of time because the endpoint is unreachable.
One way to convey information about the GRE tunnel endpoints is by using a ping mechanism. As is known in the art, ping is a protocol for testing whether a particular device is connected to the Internet by sending a packet to its IP address and waiting for a response from the device. Using ping, however, requires a separate ping session in addition to the GRE tunnel. Additionally, the ping responses must be integrated with GRE tunneling traffic indicators in order to accurately and efficiently detect the status of the endpoints. This requires additional overhead in relaying ping messages between the GRE tunnel endpoints, in addition to the complexity of establishing and integrating ping sessions with the GRE tunnel.
Therefore, there exists a need to provide an improved method for monitoring the reachability and liveness of GRE endpoints.