Exactly! I checked the IEEE standard and found additional information regarding this timer. Here is the procedure that is used by the variable you found: 17.21.23 updtRcvdInfoWhile() Updates rcvdInfoWhile (17.17.6). The value assigned to rcvdInfoWhile is the three times the Hello Time, if Message Age, incremented by 1 second and rounded to the nearest whole second, does not exceed Max Age, and is zero otherwise. The values of Message Age, Max Age, and Hello Time used in this calculation are taken from portTimes (17.19.22). It confirms what we agreed on. That the timer on the receiving side, to detect a link/path/bridge/port failure in point-to-point links using RSTP, is set to 3 times de hello time. Thanks a lot! Regards, Max ... View more

Thanks for your response! I have read this document, and now I think that the "key" word in that explanation is "...in a row..". I was confused because I was thinking about a timeout for every BPDU, so I supposed that the port receiving BPDUs (root port, for example) had to start a hello timer every time a BPDU was received from its neighboring switch, but this argument is not very solid. Now, if I think that every time a BPDU is received, the switch starts a (3 * hello) timer, and that expects to receive, at least, one BPDU per interval; this could be a good theory. Am I right ?? This is the way that the keepalive mechanism whith BPDU works ? Thanks again. Regards, Maxi ... View more