What occurs in the BGP Active state?

In the BGP Active state, the process involves the router actively trying to establish a TCP connection with its BGP peer. When the router enters this state, it indicates that the previous attempt to connect to the neighbor has failed, and therefore, it will initiate another TCP handshake with the remote neighbor to re-establish the connection.

The Active state serves as an intermediary step between the Idle and Established states. While in this state, the BGP router is not yet fully engaged in routing decisions as it hasn't successfully established a session with its neighbor. It continues attempting to establish a connection until it either succeeds, which leads to an OpenSent state where BGP will attempt to exchange Open messages with the peer, or it may revert back to the Idle state if there is a timeout or repeated failures.

Understanding the Active state is crucial as it highlights BGP's reliance on TCP to function correctly, and the continuous effort to maintain a connection is fundamental in BGP operations.