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Understanding BGP

Autonomous Systems

An autonomous system (AS) is a set of routers that are under a single technical administration and normally use a single interior gateway protocol and a common set of metrics to propagate routing information within the set of routers. To other ASs, an AS appears to have a single, coherent interior routing plan and presents a consistent picture of what destinations are reachable through it.

AS Paths and Attributes

The routing information that BGP systems exchange includes the complete route to each destination, as well as additional information about the route. The route to each destination is called the AS path, and the additional route information is included in path attributes. BGP uses the AS path and the path attributes to completely determine the network topology. Once BGP understands the topology, it can detect and eliminate routing loops and select among groups of routes to enforce administrative preferences and routing policy decisions.

External and Internal BGP

BGP supports two types of exchanges of routing information: exchanges among different ASs and exchanges within a single AS. When used among ASs, BGP is called external BGP (EBGP) and BGP sessions perform inter-AS routing. When used within an AS, BGP is called internal BGP (IBGP) and BGP sessions perform intra-AS routing. Figure 1 illustrates ASs, IBGP, and EBGP.

Figure 1: ASs, EBGP, and IBGP

A BGP system shares network reachability information with adjacent BGP systems, which are referred to as neighbors or peers.

BGP systems are arranged into groups. In an IBGP group, all peers in the group—called internal peers—are in the same AS. Internal peers can be anywhere in the local AS and do not have to be directly connected to one another. Internal groups use routes from an IGP to resolve forwarding addresses. They also propagate external routes among all other internal routers running IBGP, computing the next hop by taking the BGP next hop received with the route and resolving it using information from one of the interior gateway protocols.

In an EBGP group, the peers in the group—called external peers—are in different ASs and normally share a subnet. In an external group, the next hop is computed with respect to the interface that is shared between the external peer and the local router.

Multiple Instances of BGP

• [edit routing-instances routing-instance-name protocols]
• [edit logical-systems logical-system-name routing-instances routing-instance-name protocols]

Multiple instances of BGP are primarily used for Layer 3 VPN support.

IGP peers and external BGP (EBGP) peers (both nonmultihop and multihop) are all supported for routing instances. BGP peering is established over one of the interfaces configured under the routing-instances hierarchy.

Note: When a BGP neighbor sends BGP messages to the local routing device, the incoming interface on which these messages are received must be configured in the same routing instance that the BGP neighbor configuration exists in. This is true for neighbors that are a single hop away or multiple hops away.

Routes learned from the BGP peer are added to the instance-name.inet.0 table by default. You can configure import and export policies to control the flow of information into and out of the instance routing table.

For Layer 3 VPN support, configure BGP on the provider edge (PE) router to receive routes from the customer edge (CE) router and to send the instances’ routes to the CE router if necessary. You can use multiple instances of BGP to maintain separate per-site forwarding tables for keeping VPN traffic separate on the PE router.

You can configure import and export policies that allow the service provider to control and rate-limit traffic to and from the customer.

You can configure an EBGP multihop session for a VRF routing instance. Also, you can set up the EBGP peer between the PE and CE routers by using the loopback address of the CE router instead of the interface addresses.