The Border Gateway Protocol

• BGP is the Internet’s routing protocol
• Traditionally used for:
  • distributing reachability information within an Autonomous System (AS) => internal BGP
  • exchanging network information between different AS’s => external BGP
  • Autonomous System: a network (or group of networks) managed and controlled by a single entity.
• Lately also:
  • distributing reachability information within a datacentre (EVPN, MPLS)
  • high-speed failure detection and re-routing (with the help of BFD (Bi-directional Forwarding Detection))

IANA

• Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
• AS number allocations (and IP address allocations, and DNS TLDs) are goverened by IANA
  • via the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)
    • AFRINIC (Africa)
    • ARIN (Antarctica, Canada, some of the Caribbean, US)
    • APNIC (East Asia, Oceana, South Asia, Southeast Asia)
    • LACNIC (most of the Caribbean, Latin America)
    • RIPE (Europe, Central Asia, Russia, West Asia)
  • via Local Internet Registries (LIRs)
    • of which there are buzillions

Who uses BGP?

• you do
• ISPs
• IXs
• Organisations, who have their own public and portable IPv4 and IPv6 allocations
• potentially any company running a datacentre
  • modern layer 3 leaf-spine networks can optionally use BGP as an IGP

A brief history of BGP

• inspired by the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP), originally defined in RFC 827 (October 1982)

• "It is proposed to establish a standard for Gateway to Gateway procedures
  that allow the Gateways to be mutually suspicious."
  

• "1  INTRODUCTION
  The DARPA Catenet is expected to be a continuously expanding
  system,  with  more  and  more  hosts  on  more and more networks
  participating in it.  Of course, this will require more and  more
  gateways.   In  the  past,  such  expansion  has taken place in a
  relatively unstructured manner.  New gateways,  often  containing
  radically different software than the existing gateways, would be
  added and would immediately begin  participating  in  the  common
  routing algorithm via the GGP protocol.  However, as the internet
  grows larger and larger, this simple method of expansion  becomes
  less and less feasible."
  

• (did you know: the internet used to be called the Catenet? https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/ien/ien48.txt)

A brief history of BGP (cont…)

• Original BGP version defined in RFC 1105 (released June 1989)
• Updates defined in RFC 1163 (released June 1990)
• Version 3 defined in RFC 1267 (released October 1991)
• Version 4 defined in RFC 4271 (released January 2006)
• Multiprotocol BGP extension (MP-BGP) defined in 1998
  • Allows BGP to distribute different types (address families) of data, not just IPv4 prefixes
    • https://www.iana.org/assignments/address-family-numbers/address-family-numbers.xhtml
    • https://www.iana.org/assignments/safi-namespace/safi-namespace.xhtml

What’s special about BGP?

• it makes connections to peers over TCP/IP (tcp/179)
  • as opposed to OSPF and RIP, which use IP multicast
• it can’t discover peers
  • you have to manually configure them
• it has very strong filtering capabilities
  • route-maps, prefix-lists and access-lists
• it has a “tagging” system called BGP Communities
  • eg the BGP Community #666 means “please blackhole this prefix”
• it considers AS Path Length (among other things) when selecting the best path

Basic BGP configuration

!
router bgp 64512
   router-id 10.0.0.1
   neighbor 10.0.0.2 remote-as 64838
   neighbor 10.0.0.2 description Amazing ISP GmbH
   network 192.168.0.0/24
!

r1#show ip bgp summary
r1#show ip route bgp
r1#show ip bgp neighbor 10.0.0.2 advertised-prefixes