Patent 7720047 was granted and assigned to Juniper Networks on May, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Techniques are described for managing periodic communications between devices. For example, a periodic packet process may receive configuration parameters from a routing protocol process. The periodic packet process may manage periodic communication sessions with neighboring devices in accordance with the configuration parameters from the routing protocol process. The periodic packet process may monitor for incoming periodic packets from a specified neighboring device in a specified periodic time interval. The periodic packet process may also send outbound periodic packets at a specified periodic time interval.