IETF RFC 4781 PDF

A mechanism for BGP that helps minimize the negative effects on routing caused by BGP restart has already been developed and is described in a separate document ("Graceful Restart Mechanism for BGP"). This document extends this mechanism to minimize the negative effects on MPLS forwarding caused by the Label Switching Router's (LSR's) control plane restart, and specifically by the restart of its BGP component when BGP is used to carry MPLS labels and the LSR is capable of preserving the MPLS forwarding state across the restart.

The mechanism described in this document is agnostic with respect to the types of the addresses carried in the BGP Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) field. As such, it works in conjunction with any of the address families that could be carried in BGP (e.g., IPv4, IPv6, etc.).