The period of time that the local node is willing to retain its MPLS forwarding state, if any,that it preserved across the restart. This field is used to calculate the Recovery Time for both Control Plane and Control Channel restarts. It is used to calculate the Recovery Time advertised in the FT Session TLV in the Initialization message sent to the neighbor. For devices which only act as the Helper node, this timer is unused and will return value 0.