summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorThomas Voss <mail@thomasvoss.com> 2024-11-27 20:54:24 +0100
committerThomas Voss <mail@thomasvoss.com> 2024-11-27 20:54:24 +0100
commit4bfd864f10b68b71482b35c818559068ef8d5797 (patch)
treee3989f47a7994642eb325063d46e8f08ffa681dc /doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt
parentea76e11061bda059ae9f9ad130a9895cc85607db (diff)
doc: Add RFC documents
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt')
-rw-r--r--doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt1067
1 files changed, 1067 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt b/doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dc14f41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/rfc/rfc1772.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1067 @@
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Network Working Group Y. Rekhter
+Request for Comments: 1772 T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp.
+Obsoletes: 1655 P. Gross
+Category: Standards Track MCI
+ Editors
+ March 1995
+
+
+ Application of the Border Gateway Protocol in the Internet
+
+Status of this Memo
+
+ This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
+ Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
+ improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
+ Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
+ and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
+
+Abstract
+
+ This document, together with its companion document, "A Border
+ Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", define an inter-autonomous system
+ routing protocol for the Internet. "A Border Gateway Protocol 4
+ (BGP-4)" defines the BGP protocol specification, and this document
+ describes the usage of the BGP in the Internet.
+
+ Information about the progress of BGP can be monitored and/or
+ reported on the BGP mailing list (bgp@ans.net).
+
+Acknowledgements
+
+ This document was originally published as RFC 1164 in June 1990,
+ jointly authored by Jeffrey C. Honig (Cornell University), Dave Katz
+ (MERIT), Matt Mathis (PSC), Yakov Rekhter (IBM), and Jessica Yu
+ (MERIT).
+
+ The following also made key contributions to RFC 1164 -- Guy Almes
+ (ANS, then at Rice University), Kirk Lougheed (cisco Systems), Hans-
+ Werner Braun (SDSC, then at MERIT), and Sue Hares (MERIT).
+
+ We like to explicitly thank Bob Braden (ISI) for the review of the
+ previous version of this document.
+
+ This updated version of the document is the product of the IETF BGP
+ Working Group with Phill Gross (MCI) and Yakov Rekhter (IBM) as
+ editors.
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 1]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ John Moy (Proteon) contributed Section 7 "Required set of supported
+ routing policies".
+
+ Scott Brim (Cornell University) contributed the basis for Section 8
+ "Interaction with other exterior routing protocols".
+
+ Most of the text in Section 9 was contributed by Gerry Meyer
+ (Spider).
+
+ Parts of the Introduction were taken almost verbatim from [3].
+
+ We would like to acknowledge Dan Long (NEARNET) and Tony Li (cisco
+ Systems) for their review and comments on the current version of the
+ document.
+
+ The work of Yakov Rekhter was supported in part by the National
+ Science Foundation under Grant Number NCR-9219216.
+
+1. Introduction
+
+ This memo describes the use of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [1]
+ in the Internet environment. BGP is an inter-Autonomous System
+ routing protocol. The network reachability information exchanged via
+ BGP provides sufficient information to detect routing loops and
+ enforce routing decisions based on performance preference and policy
+ constraints as outlined in RFC 1104 [2]. In particular, BGP exchanges
+ routing information containing full AS paths and enforces routing
+ policies based on configuration information.
+
+ As the Internet has evolved and grown over in recent years, it has
+ become painfully evident that it is soon to face several serious
+ scaling problems. These include:
+
+ - Exhaustion of the class-B network address space. One
+ fundamental cause of this problem is the lack of a network
+ class of a size which is appropriate for mid-sized
+ organization; class-C, with a maximum of 254 host addresses, is
+ too small while class-B, which allows up to 65534 addresses, is
+ too large to be densely populated.
+
+ - Growth of routing tables in Internet routers are beyond the
+ ability of current software (and people) to effectively manage.
+
+ - Eventual exhaustion of the 32-bit IP address space.
+
+ It has become clear that the first two of these problems are likely
+ to become critical within the next one to three years. Classless
+ inter-domain routing (CIDR) attempts to deal with these problems by
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 2]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ proposing a mechanism to slow the growth of the routing table and the
+ need for allocating new IP network numbers. It does not attempt to
+ solve the third problem, which is of a more long-term nature, but
+ instead endeavors to ease enough of the short to mid-term
+ difficulties to allow the Internet to continue to function
+ efficiently while progress is made on a longer-term solution.
+
+ BGP-4 is an extension of BGP-3 that provides support for routing
+ information aggregation and reduction based on the Classless inter-
+ domain routing architecture (CIDR) [3]. This memo describes the
+ usage of BGP-4 in the Internet.
+
+ All of the discussions in this paper are based on the assumption that
+ the Internet is a collection of arbitrarily connected Autonomous
+ Systems. That is, the Internet will be modeled as a general graph
+ whose nodes are AS's and whose edges are connections between pairs of
+ AS's.
+
+ The classic definition of an Autonomous System is a set of routers
+ under a single technical administration, using an interior gateway
+ protocol and common metrics to route packets within the AS and using
+ an exterior gateway protocol to route packets to other AS's. Since
+ this classic definition was developed, it has become common for a
+ single AS to use several interior gateway protocols and sometimes
+ several sets of metrics within an AS. The use of the term Autonomous
+ System here stresses the fact that, even when multiple IGPs and
+ metrics are used, the administration of an AS appears to other AS's
+ to have a single coherent interior routing plan and presents a
+ consistent picture of which destinations are reachable through it.
+
+ AS's are assumed to be administered by a single administrative
+ entity, at least for the purposes of representation of routing
+ information to systems outside of the AS.
+
+2. BGP Topological Model
+
+ When we say that a connection exists between two AS's, we mean two
+ things:
+
+ Physical connection: There is a shared Data Link subnetwork
+ between the two AS's, and on this shared subnetwork each AS has at
+ least one border gateway belonging to that AS. Thus the border
+ gateway of each AS can forward packets to the border gateway of
+ the other AS without resorting to Inter-AS or Intra-AS routing.
+
+ BGP connection: There is a BGP session between BGP speakers in
+ each of the AS's, and this session communicates those routes that
+ can be used for specific destinations via the advertising AS.
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 3]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ Throughout this document we place an additional restriction on the
+ BGP speakers that form the BGP connection: they must themselves
+ share the same Data Link subnetwork that their border gateways
+ share. Thus, a BGP session between adjacent AS's requires no
+ support from either Inter-AS or Intra-AS routing. Cases that do
+ not conform to this restriction fall outside the scope of this
+ document.
+
+ Thus, at each connection, each AS has one or more BGP speakers and
+ one or more border gateways, and these BGP speakers and border
+ gateways are all located on a shared Data Link subnetwork. Note that
+ BGP speakers do not need to be a border gateway, and vice versa.
+ Paths announced by a BGP speaker of one AS on a given connection are
+ taken to be feasible for each of the border gateways of the other AS
+ on the same shared subnetwork, i.e. indirect neighbors are allowed.
+
+ Much of the traffic carried within an AS either originates or
+ terminates at that AS (i.e., either the source IP address or the
+ destination IP address of the IP packet identifies a host internal to
+ that AS). Traffic that fits this description is called "local
+ traffic". Traffic that does not fit this description is called
+ "transit traffic". A major goal of BGP usage is to control the flow
+ of transit traffic.
+
+ Based on how a particular AS deals with transit traffic, the AS may
+ now be placed into one of the following categories:
+
+ stub AS: an AS that has only a single connection to one other AS.
+ Naturally, a stub AS only carries local traffic.
+
+ multihomed AS: an AS that has connections to more than one other
+ AS, but refuses to carry transit traffic.
+
+ transit AS: an AS that has connections to more than one other AS,
+ and is designed (under certain policy restrictions) to carry both
+ transit and local traffic.
+
+ Since a full AS path provides an efficient and straightforward way of
+ suppressing routing loops and eliminates the "count-to-infinity"
+ problem associated with some distance vector algorithms, BGP imposes
+ no topological restrictions on the interconnection of AS's.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 4]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+3. BGP in the Internet
+
+3.1 Topology Considerations
+
+ The overall Internet topology may be viewed as an arbitrary
+ interconnection of transit, multihomed, and stub AS's. In order to
+ minimize the impact on the current Internet infrastructure, stub and
+ multihomed AS's need not use BGP. These AS's may run other protocols
+ (e.g., EGP) to exchange reachability information with transit AS's.
+ Transit AS's using BGP will tag this information as having been
+ learned by some method other than BGP. The fact that BGP need not run
+ on stub or multihomed AS's has no negative impact on the overall
+ quality of inter-AS routing for traffic that either destined to or
+ originated from the stub or multihomed AS's in question.
+
+ However, it is recommended that BGP be used for stub and multihomed
+ AS's as well. In these situations, BGP will provide an advantage in
+ bandwidth and performance over some of the currently used protocols
+ (such as EGP). In addition, this would reduce the need for the use
+ of default routes and in better choices of Inter-AS routes for
+ multihomed AS's.
+
+3.2 Global Nature of BGP
+
+ At a global level, BGP is used to distribute routing information
+ among multiple Autonomous Systems. The information flows can be
+ represented as follows:
+
+ +-------+ +-------+
+ BGP | BGP | BGP | BGP | BGP
+ ---------+ +---------+ +---------
+ | IGP | | IGP |
+ +-------+ +-------+
+
+ <-AS A--> <--AS B->
+
+ This diagram points out that, while BGP alone carries information
+ between AS's, both BGP and an IGP may carry information across an AS.
+ Ensuring consistency of routing information between BGP and an IGP
+ within an AS is a significant issue and is discussed at length later
+ in Appendix A.
+
+3.3 BGP Neighbor Relationships
+
+ The Internet is viewed as a set of arbitrarily connected AS's.
+ Routers that communicate directly with each other via BGP are known
+ as BGP speakers. BGP speakers can be located within the same AS or in
+ different AS's. BGP speakers in each AS communicate with each other
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 5]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ to exchange network reachability information based on a set of
+ policies established within each AS. For a given BGP speaker, some
+ other BGP speaker with which the given speaker communicates is
+ referred to as an external peer if the other speaker is in a
+ different AS, while if the other speaker is in the same AS it is
+ referred to as an internal peer.
+
+ There can be as many BGP speakers as deemed necessary within an AS.
+ Usually, if an AS has multiple connections to other AS's, multiple
+ BGP speakers are needed. All BGP speakers representing the same AS
+ must give a consistent image of the AS to the outside. This requires
+ that the BGP speakers have consistent routing information among them.
+ These gateways can communicate with each other via BGP or by other
+ means. The policy constraints applied to all BGP speakers within an
+ AS must be consistent. Techniques such as using a tagged IGP (see
+ A.2.2) may be employed to detect possible inconsistencies.
+
+ In the case of external peers, the peers must belong to different
+ AS's, but share a common Data Link subnetwork. This common subnetwork
+ should be used to carry the BGP messages between them. The use of BGP
+ across an intervening AS invalidates the AS path information. An
+ Autonomous System number must be used with BGP to specify which
+ Autonomous System the BGP speaker belongs to.
+
+4. Requirements for Route Aggregation
+
+ A conformant BGP-4 implementation is required to have the ability to
+ specify when an aggregated route may be generated out of partial
+ routing information. For example, a BGP speaker at the border of an
+ autonomous system (or group of autonomous systems) must be able to
+ generate an aggregated route for a whole set of destination IP
+ addresses (in BGP-4 terminology such a set is called the Network
+ Layer Reachability Information or NLRI) over which it has
+ administrative control (including those addresses it has delegated),
+ even when not all of them are reachable at the same time.
+
+ A conformant implementation may provide the capability to specify
+ when an aggregated NLRI may be generated.
+
+ A conformant implementation is required to have the ability to
+ specify how NLRI may be de-aggregated.
+
+ A conformant implementation is required to support the following
+ options when dealing with overlapping routes:
+
+ - Install both the less and the more specific routes
+
+ - Install the more specific route only
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 6]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ - Install the less specific route only
+
+ - Install neither route
+
+ Certain routing policies may depend on the NLRI (e.g. "research"
+ versus "commercial"). Therefore, a BGP speaker that performs route
+ aggregation should be cognizant, if possible, of potential
+ implications on routing policies when aggregating NLRI.
+
+5. Policy Making with BGP
+
+ BGP provides the capability for enforcing policies based on various
+ routing preferences and constraints. Policies are not directly
+ encoded in the protocol. Rather, policies are provided to BGP in the
+ form of configuration information.
+
+ BGP enforces policies by affecting the selection of paths from
+ multiple alternatives and by controlling the redistribution of
+ routing information. Policies are determined by the AS
+ administration.
+
+ Routing policies are related to political, security, or economic
+ considerations. For example, if an AS is unwilling to carry traffic
+ to another AS, it can enforce a policy prohibiting this. The
+ following are examples of routing policies that can be enforced with
+ the use of BGP:
+
+ 1. A multihomed AS can refuse to act as a transit AS for other
+ AS's. (It does so by only advertising routes to destinations
+ internal to the AS.)
+
+ 2. A multihomed AS can become a transit AS for a restricted set of
+ adjacent AS's, i.e., some, but not all, AS's can use the
+ multihomed AS as a transit AS. (It does so by advertising its
+ routing information to this set of AS's.)
+
+ 3. An AS can favor or disfavor the use of certain AS's for
+ carrying transit traffic from itself.
+
+ A number of performance-related criteria can be controlled with the
+ use of BGP:
+
+ 1. An AS can minimize the number of transit AS's. (Shorter AS
+ paths can be preferred over longer ones.)
+
+ 2. The quality of transit AS's. If an AS determines that two or
+ more AS paths can be used to reach a given destination, that AS
+ can use a variety of means to decide which of the candidate AS
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 7]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ paths it will use. The quality of an AS can be measured by such
+ things as diameter, link speed, capacity, tendency to become
+ congested, and quality of operation. Information about these
+ qualities might be determined by means other than BGP.
+
+ 3. Preference of internal routes over external routes.
+
+ For consistency within an AS, equal cost paths, resulting from
+ combinations of policies and/or normal route selection procedures,
+ must be resolved in a consistent fashion.
+
+ Fundamental to BGP is the rule that an AS advertises to its
+ neighboring AS's only those routes that it uses. This rule reflects
+ the "hop-by-hop" routing paradigm generally used by the current
+ Internet.
+
+6. Path Selection with BGP
+
+ One of the major tasks of a BGP speaker is to evaluate different
+ paths from itself to a set of destination covered by an address
+ prefix, select the best one, apply appropriate policy constraints,
+ and then advertise it to all of its BGP neighbors. The key issue is
+ how different paths are evaluated and compared. In traditional
+ distance vector protocols (e.g., RIP) there is only one metric (e.g.,
+ hop count) associated with a path. As such, comparison of different
+ paths is reduced to simply comparing two numbers. A complication in
+ Inter-AS routing arises from the lack of a universally agreed-upon
+ metric among AS's that can be used to evaluate external paths.
+ Rather, each AS may have its own set of criteria for path evaluation.
+
+ A BGP speaker builds a routing database consisting of the set of all
+ feasible paths and the list of destinations (expressed as address
+ prefixes) reachable through each path. For purposes of precise
+ discussion, it's useful to consider the set of feasible paths for a
+ set of destinations associated with a given address prefix. In most
+ cases, we would expect to find only one feasible path. However, when
+ this is not the case, all feasible paths should be maintained, and
+ their maintenance speeds adaptation to the loss of the primary path.
+ Only the primary path at any given time will ever be advertised.
+
+ The path selection process can be formalized by defining a complete
+ order over the set of all feasible paths to a set of destinations
+ associated with a given address prefix. One way to define this
+ complete order is to define a function that maps each full AS path to
+ a non-negative integer that denotes the path's degree of preference.
+ Path selection is then reduced to applying this function to all
+ feasible paths and choosing the one with the highest degree of
+ preference.
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 8]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ In actual BGP implementations, the criteria for assigning degree of
+ preferences to a path are specified as configuration information.
+
+ The process of assigning a degree of preference to a path can be
+ based on several sources of information:
+
+ 1. Information explicitly present in the full AS path.
+
+ 2. A combination of information that can be derived from the full
+ AS path and information outside the scope of BGP (e.g., policy
+ routing constraints provided as configuration information).
+
+ Possible criteria for assigning a degree of preference to a path are:
+
+ - AS count. Paths with a smaller AS count are generally better.
+
+ - Policy considerations. BGP supports policy-based routing based
+ on the controlled distribution of routing information. A BGP
+ speaker may be aware of some policy constraints (both within
+ and outside of its own AS) and do appropriate path selection.
+ Paths that do not comply with policy requirements are not
+ considered further.
+
+ - Presence or absence of a certain AS or AS's in the path. By
+ means of information outside the scope of BGP, an AS may know
+ some performance characteristics (e.g., bandwidth, MTU, intra-
+ AS diameter) of certain AS's and may try to avoid or prefer
+ them.
+
+ - Path origin. A path learned entirely from BGP (i.e., whose
+ endpoint is internal to the last AS on the path) is generally
+ better than one for which part of the path was learned via EGP
+ or some other means.
+
+ - AS path subsets. An AS path that is a subset of a longer AS
+ path to the same destination should be preferred over the
+ longer path. Any problem in the shorter path (such as an
+ outage) will also be a problem in the longer path.
+
+ - Link dynamics. Stable paths should be preferred over unstable
+ ones. Note that this criterion must be used in a very careful
+ way to avoid causing unnecessary route fluctuation. Generally,
+ any criteria that depend on dynamic information might cause
+ routing instability and should be treated very carefully.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 9]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+7. Required set of supported routing policies
+
+Policies are provided to BGP in the form of configuration
+information. This information is not directly encoded in the
+protocol. Therefore, BGP can provide support for very complex routing
+policies. However, it is not required that all BGP implementations
+support such policies.
+
+We are not attempting to standardize the routing policies that must
+be supported in every BGP implementation; we strongly encourage all
+implementors to support the following set of routing policies:
+
+ 1. BGP implementations should allow an AS to control announcements
+ of BGP-learned routes to adjacent AS's. Implementations should
+ also support such control with at least the granularity of a
+ single address prefix. Implementations should also support
+ such control with the granularity of an autonomous system,
+ where the autonomous system may be either the autonomous system
+ that originated the route, or the autonomous system that
+ advertised the route to the local system (adjacent autonomous
+ system). Care must be taken when a BGP speaker selects a new
+ route that can't be announced to a particular external peer,
+ while the previously selected route was announced to that peer.
+ Specifically, the local system must explicitly indicate to the
+ peer that the previous route is now infeasible.
+
+ 2. BGP implementations should allow an AS to prefer a particular
+ path to a destination (when more than one path is available).
+ At the minimum an implementation shall support this
+ functionality by allowing to administratively assign a degree
+ of preference to a route based solely on the IP address of the
+ neighbor the route is received from. The allowed range of the
+ assigned degree of preference shall be between 0 and 2^(31) -
+ 1.
+
+ 3. BGP implementations should allow an AS to ignore routes with
+ certain AS's in the AS_PATH path attribute. Such function can
+ be implemented by using the technique outlined in [2], and by
+ assigning "infinity" as "weights" for such AS's. The route
+ selection process must ignore routes that have "weight" equal
+ to "infinity".
+
+8. Interaction with other exterior routing protocols
+
+ The guidelines suggested in this section are consistent with the
+ guidelines presented in [3].
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 10]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ An AS should advertise a minimal aggregate for its internal
+ destinations with respect to the amount of address space that it is
+ actually using. This can be used by administrators of non-BGP 4 AS's
+ to determine how many routes to explode from a single aggregate.
+
+ A route that carries the ATOMIC_AGGREGATE path attribute shall not be
+ exported into either BGP-3 or EGP2, unless such an exportation can be
+ accomplished without exploding the NLRI of the route.
+
+8.1 Exchanging information with EGP2
+
+ This document suggests the following guidelines for exchanging
+ routing information between BGP-4 and EGP2.
+
+ To provide for graceful migration, a BGP speaker may participate in
+ EGP2, as well as in BGP-4. Thus, a BGP speaker may receive IP
+ reachability information by means of EGP2 as well as by means of
+ BGP-4. The information received by EGP2 can be injected into BGP-4
+ with the ORIGIN path attribute set to 1. Likewise, the information
+ received via BGP-4 can be injected into EGP2 as well. In the latter
+ case, however, one needs to be aware of the potential information
+ explosion when a given IP prefix received from BGP-4 denotes a set of
+ consecutive A/B/C class networks. Injection of BGP-4 received NLRI
+ that denotes IP subnets requires the BGP speaker to inject the
+ corresponding network into EGP2. The local system shall provide
+ mechanisms to control the exchange of reachability information
+ between EGP2 and BGP-4. Specifically, a conformant implementation is
+ required to support all of the following options when injecting BGP-4
+ received reachability information into EGP2:
+
+ - inject default only (0.0.0.0); no export of any other NLRI
+
+ - allow controlled deaggregation, but only of specific routes;
+ allow export of non-aggregated NLRI
+
+ - allow export of only non-aggregated NLRI
+
+ The exchange of routing information via EGP2 between a BGP speaker
+ participating in BGP-4 and a pure EGP2 speaker may occur only at the
+ domain (autonomous system) boundaries.
+
+8.2 Exchanging information with BGP-3
+
+ This document suggests the following guidelines for exchanging
+ routing information between BGP-4 and BGP-3.
+
+ To provide for graceful migration, a BGP speaker may participate in
+ BGP-3, as well as in BGP-4. Thus, a BGP speaker may receive IP
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 11]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ reachability information by means of BGP-3, as well as by means of
+ BGP-4.
+
+ A BGP speaker may inject the information received by BGP-4 into BGP-3
+ as follows.
+
+ If an AS_PATH attribute of a BGP-4 route carries AS_SET path
+ segments, then the AS_PATH attribute of the BGP-3 route shall be
+ constructed by treating the AS_SET segments as AS_SEQUENCE segments,
+ with the resulting AS_PATH being a single AS_SEQUENCE. While this
+ procedure loses set/sequence information, it doesn't affect
+ protection for routing loops suppression, but may affect policies, if
+ the policies are based on the content or ordering of the AS_PATH
+ attribute.
+
+ While injecting BGP-4 derived NLRI into BGP-3, one needs to be aware
+ of the potential information explosion when a given IP prefix denotes
+ a set of consecutive A/B/C class networks. Injection of BGP-4 derived
+ NLRI that denotes IP subnets requires the BGP speaker to inject the
+ corresponding network into BGP-3. The local system shall provide
+ mechanisms to control the exchange of routing information between
+ BGP-3 and BGP-4. Specifically, a conformant implementation is
+ required to support all of the following options when injecting BGP-4
+ received routing information into BGP-3:
+
+ - inject default only (0.0.0.0), no export of any other NLRI
+
+ - allow controlled deaggregation, but only of specific routes;
+ allow export of non-aggregated NLRI
+
+ - allow export of only non-aggregated NLRI
+
+ The exchange of routing information via BGP-3 between a BGP speaker
+ participating in BGP-4 and a pure BGP-3 speaker may occur only at
+ the autonomous system boundaries. Within a single autonomous system
+ BGP conversations between all the BGP speakers of that autonomous
+ system have to be either BGP-3 or BGP-4, but not a mixture.
+
+9. Operations over Switched Virtual Circuits
+
+ When using BGP over Switched Virtual Circuit (SVC) subnetworks it may
+ be desirable to minimize traffic generated by BGP. Specifically, it
+ may be desirable to eliminate traffic associated with periodic
+ KEEPALIVE messages. BGP includes a mechanism for operation over
+ switched virtual circuit (SVC) services which avoids keeping SVCs
+ permanently open and allows it to eliminates periodic sending of
+ KEEPALIVE messages.
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 12]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ This section describes how to operate without periodic KEEPALIVE
+ messages to minimise SVC usage when using an intelligent SVC circuit
+ manager. The proposed scheme may also be used on "permanent"
+ circuits, which support a feature like link quality monitoring or
+ echo request to determine the status of link connectivity.
+
+ The mechanism described in this section is suitable only between the
+ BGP speakers that are directly connected over a common virtual
+ circuit.
+
+9.1 Establishing a BGP Connection
+
+ The feature is selected by specifying zero Hold Time in the OPEN
+ message.
+
+9.2 Circuit Manager Properties
+
+ The circuit manager must have sufficient functionality to be able to
+ compensate for the lack of periodic KEEPALIVE messages:
+
+ - It must be able to determine link layer unreachability in a
+ predictable finite period of a failure occurring.
+
+ - On determining unreachability it should:
+
+ - start a configurable dead timer (comparable to a
+ typical Hold timer value).
+
+ - attempt to re-establish the Link Layer connection.
+
+
+ - If the dead timer expires it should:
+
+ - send an internal circuit DEAD indication to TCP.
+
+ - If the connection is re-established it should:
+
+ - cancel the dead timer.
+
+ - send an internal circuit UP indication to TCP.
+
+9.3 TCP Properties
+
+ A small modification must be made to TCP to process internal
+ notifications from the circuit manager:
+
+ - DEAD: Flush transmit queue and abort TCP connection.
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 13]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ - UP: Transmit any queued data or allow an outgoing TCP call to
+ proceed.
+
+9.4 Combined Properties
+
+ Some implementations may not be able to guarantee that the BGP
+ process and the circuit manager will operate as a single entity; i.e.
+ they can have a separate existence when the other has been stopped or
+ has crashed.
+
+ If this is the case, a periodic two-way poll between the BGP process
+ and the circuit manager should be implemented. If the BGP process
+ discovers the circuit manager has gone away it should close all
+ relevant TCP connections. If the circuit manager discovers the BGP
+ process has gone away it should close all its connections associated
+ with the BGP process and reject any further incoming connections.
+
+10. Conclusion
+
+ The BGP protocol provides a high degree of control and flexibility
+ for doing interdomain routing while enforcing policy and performance
+ constraints and avoiding routing loops. The guidelines presented here
+ will provide a starting point for using BGP to provide more
+ sophisticated and manageable routing in the Internet as it grows.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 14]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+Appendix A. The Interaction of BGP and an IGP
+
+ This section outlines methods by which BGP can exchange routing
+ information with an IGP. The methods outlined here are not proposed
+ as part of the standard BGP usage at this time. These methods are
+ outlined for information purposes only. Implementors may want to
+ consider these methods when importing IGP information.
+
+ This is general information that applies to any generic IGP.
+
+ Interaction between BGP and any specific IGP is outside the scope of
+ this section. Methods for specific IGP's should be proposed in
+ separate documents. Methods for specific IGP's could be proposed for
+ standard usage in the future.
+
+Overview
+
+ By definition, all transit AS's must be able to carry traffic which
+ originates from and/or is destined to locations outside of that AS.
+ This requires a certain degree of interaction and coordination
+ between BGP and the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) used by that
+ particular AS. In general, traffic originating outside of a given AS
+ is going to pass through both interior gateways (gateways that
+ support the IGP only) and border gateways (gateways that support both
+ the IGP and BGP). All interior gateways receive information about
+ external routes from one or more of the border gateways of the AS via
+ the IGP.
+
+ Depending on the mechanism used to propagate BGP information within a
+ given AS, special care must be taken to ensure consistency between
+ BGP and the IGP, since changes in state are likely to propagate at
+ different rates across the AS. There may be a time window between the
+ moment when some border gateway (A) receives new BGP routing
+ information which was originated from another border gateway (B)
+ within the same AS, and the moment the IGP within this AS is capable
+ of routing transit traffic to that border gateway (B). During that
+ time window, either incorrect routing or "black holes" can occur.
+
+ In order to minimize such routing problems, border gateway (A) should
+ not advertise to any of its external peers a route to some set of
+ exterior destinations associated with a given address prefix X via
+ border gateway (B) until all the interior gateways within the AS are
+ ready to route traffic destined to these destinations via the correct
+ exit border gateway (B). In other words, interior routing should
+ converge on the proper exit gateway before/advertising routes via
+ that exit gateway to external peers.
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 15]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+A.2 Methods for Achieving Stable Interactions
+
+ The following discussion outlines several techniques capable of
+ achieving stable interactions between BGP and the IGP within an
+ Autonomous System.
+
+A.2.1 Propagation of BGP Information via the IGP
+
+ While BGP can provide its own mechanism for carrying BGP information
+ within an AS, one can also use an IGP to transport this information,
+ as long as the IGP supports complete flooding of routing information
+ (providing the mechanism to distribute the BGP information) and one
+ pass convergence (making the mechanism effectively atomic). If an IGP
+ is used to carry BGP information, then the period of
+ desynchronization described earlier does not occur at all, since BGP
+ information propagates within the AS synchronously with the IGP, and
+ the IGP converges more or less simultaneously with the arrival of the
+ new routing information. Note that the IGP only carries BGP
+ information and should not interpret or process this information.
+
+A.2.2 Tagged Interior Gateway Protocol
+
+ Certain IGPs can tag routes exterior to an AS with the identity of
+ their exit points while propagating them within the AS. Each border
+ gateway should use identical tags for announcing exterior routing
+ information (received via BGP) both into the IGP and when propagating
+ this information to other internal peers (peers within the same AS).
+ Tags generated by a border gateway must uniquely identify that
+ particular border gateway--different border gateways must use
+ different tags.
+
+ All Border Gateways within a single AS must observe the following two
+ rules:
+
+ 1. Information received from an internal peer by a border gateway
+ A declaring a set of destination associated with a given
+ address prefix to be unreachable must immediately be propagated
+ to all of the external peers of A.
+
+ 2. Information received from an internal peer by a border gateway
+ A about a set of reachable destinations associated with a given
+ address prefix X cannot be propagated to any of the external
+ peers of A unless/until A has an IGP route to the set of
+ destinations covered by X and both the IGP and the BGP routing
+ information have identical tags.
+
+ These rules guarantee that no routing information is announced
+ externally unless the IGP is capable of correctly supporting it. It
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 16]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ also avoids some causes of "black holes".
+
+ One possible method for tagging BGP and IGP routes within an AS is to
+ use the IP address of the exit border gateway announcing the exterior
+ route into the AS. In this case the "gateway" field in the BGP UPDATE
+ message is used as the tag.
+
+ An alternate method for tagging BGP and IGP routes is to have BGP and
+ the IGP agree on a router ID. In this case, the router ID is
+ available to all BGP (version 3 or higher) speakers. Since this ID
+ is already unique it can be used directly as the tag in the IGP.
+
+A.2.3 Encapsulation
+
+ Encapsulation provides the simplest (in terms of the interaction
+ between the IGP and BGP) mechanism for carrying transit traffic
+ across the AS. In this approach, transit traffic is encapsulated
+ within an IP datagram addressed to the exit gateway. The only
+ requirement imposed on the IGP by this approach is that it should be
+ capable of supporting routing between border gateways within the same
+ AS.
+
+ The address of the exit gateway A for some exterior destination X is
+ specified in the BGP identifier field of the BGP OPEN message
+ received from gateway A (via BGP) by all other border gateways within
+ the same AS. In order to route traffic to destination X, each border
+ gateway within the AS encapsulates it in datagrams addressed to
+ gateway A. Gateway A then performs decapsulation and forwards the
+ original packet to the proper gateway in another AS.
+
+ Since encapsulation does not rely on the IGP to carry exterior
+ routing information, no synchronization between BGP and the IGP is
+ required.
+
+ Some means of identifying datagrams containing encapsulated IP, such
+ as an IP protocol type code, must be defined if this method is to be
+ used.
+
+ Note that, if a packet to be encapsulated has length that is very
+ close to the MTU, that packet would be fragmented at the gateway that
+ performs encapsulation.
+
+A.2.4 Pervasive BGP
+
+ If all routers in an AS are BGP speakers, then there is no need to
+ have any interaction between BGP and an IGP. In such cases, all
+ routers in the AS already have full information of all BGP routes.
+ The IGP is then only used for routing within the AS, and no BGP
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 17]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+ routes are imported into the IGP.
+
+ For routers to operate in this fashion, they must be able to perform
+ a recursive lookup in their routing table. The first lookup will use
+ a BGP route to establish the exit router, while the second lookup
+ will determine the IGP path to the exit router.
+
+ Since the IGP carries no external information in this scenario, all
+ routers in the AS will have converged as soon as all BGP speakers
+ have new information about this route. Since there is no need to
+ delay for the IGP to converge, an implementation may advertise these
+ routes without further delay due to the IGP.
+
+A.2.5 Other Cases
+
+ There may be AS's with IGPs which can neither carry BGP information
+ nor tag exterior routes (e.g., RIP). In addition, encapsulation may
+ be either infeasible or undesirable. In such situations, the
+ following two rules must be observed:
+
+ 1. Information received from an internal peer by a border gateway
+ A declaring a destination to be unreachable must immediately be
+ propagated to all of the external peers of A.
+
+ 2. Information received from an internal peer by a border gateway
+ A about a reachable destination X cannot be propagated to any
+ of the external peers of A unless A has an IGP route to X and
+ sufficient time has passed for the IGP routes to have
+ converged.
+
+ The above rules present necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for
+ propagating BGP routing information to other AS's. In contrast to
+ tagged IGPs, these rules cannot ensure that interior routes to the
+ proper exit gateways are in place before propagating the routes to
+ other AS's.
+
+ If the convergence time of an IGP is less than some small value X,
+ then the time window during which the IGP and BGP are unsynchronized
+ is less than X as well, and the whole issue can be ignored at the
+ cost of transient periods (of less than length X) of routing
+ instability. A reasonable value for X is a matter for further study,
+ but X should probably be less than one second.
+
+ If the convergence time of an IGP cannot be ignored, a different
+ approach is needed. Mechanisms and techniques which might be
+ appropriate in this situation are subjects for further study.
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 18]
+
+RFC 1772 BGP-4 Application March 1995
+
+
+References
+
+ [1] Rekhter Y., and T. Li, "A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4), RFC
+ 1771, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp., cisco Systems,
+ March 1995.
+
+ [2] Braun, H-W., "Models of Policy Based Routing", RFC 1104,
+ Merit/NSFNET, June 1989.
+
+ [3] Fuller, V., Li, T., Yu, J., and K. Varadhan, "Supernetting: an
+ Address Assignment and Aggregation Strategy", RFC1519, BARRNet,
+ cisco, MERIT, OARnet, September 1993.
+
+Security Considerations
+
+ Security issues are not discussed in this memo.
+
+Authors' Addresses
+
+ Yakov Rekhter
+ T.J. Watson Research Center IBM Corporation
+ P.O. Box 704, Office H3-D40
+ Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
+
+ Phone: +1 914 784 7361
+ EMail: yakov@watson.ibm.com
+
+
+ Phill Gross
+ MCI Data Services Division
+ 2100 Reston Parkway, Room 6001,
+ Reston, VA 22091
+
+ Phone: +1 703 715 7432
+ EMail: 0006423401@mcimail.com
+
+
+ IETF IDR WG mailing list: bgp@ans.net
+ To be added: bgp-request@ans.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Rekhter & Gross [Page 19]
+