A keepalive is a message sent by one device to another to check that the link between the two is operating, or to prevent this link from being broken.
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A keepalive signal is often sent at predefined intervals, and plays an important role on the Internet. After a signal is sent, if no reply is received the link is assumed to be down and future data will be routed via another path until the link is up again. A keepalive signal can also be used to indicate to Internet infrastructure that the connection should be preserved. Without a keepalive signal intermediate routers can drop the connection after timeout.
Since the only purpose is to find links that don't work or to indicate links that should be preserved, keepalive messages tend to be short and not take much bandwidth. However, their precise format and usage terms depend on the communication protocol.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol supports explicit means for maintaining an active connection between client and server.
Under Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) keepalives are an optional feature, and if included must default to off.[1] The keepalive packet contains null data. In an Ethernet network, a keepalive frame length is 60 bytes, while acknowledge to this, also a null data frame, is 54 bytes. There are three parameters related to keepalive: