A method of failure detection on an Internet Protocol (IP) forwarding plane, which includes: IP nodes of the two ends obtain Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) identifier information which is used in the BFD, moreover start a BFD session, encapsulate and transport a BFD packet between the IP nodes running the BFD session and implement the failure detection according to the BFD packet transported between the IP nodes. The method of this invention realizes the failure detection via starting the BFD session and via transporting the BFD packet between the inter-domain IP nodes or the intra-domain IP nodes.