Border Gateway Protocol Concepts


Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is quite different from other routing protocol. BGP is the Internet routing protocol and it is a slow routing protocol which is good for an Internet routing protocol. There are two kinds of BGP, which are Interior BGP and Exterior BGP. IBGP is when BGP is configured between routers within same Autonomous System (AS), while EBGP is when BGP is configured between routers in a different AS. EBGP behaves differently with IBGP. As we know that other Interior Gateway Routing Protocol such as RIP, OSPF or EIGRP will update the next hop address when advertising routes to its neighbor. IBGP doesn't do this.



Neighbor in BGP should be configured manually. Another different concept in BGP is that neighbor in BGP shouldn't always be direct connected. In this topology bellow, R1 and R3 could be a neighbor without having a direct connection to each other.


Instead of having a metric to determine the best path to a network, BGP uses a list of attribute. These attributes have an order of precedence, each attribute of the feasible routes will be evaluated in order and the best path will be chosen when there is an attribute that is better than the others.


There are also two rules in IBGP, which are the synchronization rule and the split-horizon rule.


Synchronization Rule

The synchronization rule says that BGP won't advertised a route to other EBGP peers, if the route has not been learned by an IGP. Consider the following scenario



R4 advertises the network 12.10.0.0/16 to R1, which will then advertise the network to R3, since they are an IBGP peer. But R3 won't advertise the network to R5 if the IGP running in its AS has not learned the 12.10.0.0/16 network. This rule is used to avoid the "blackhole" problem. If R3 ever advertises the network to R5, then R5 will send packets destined to 12.10.0.0/16 network to R3. Then R3 will send the packets to R2, but R2 does not know about that network since it is not running BGP. The packets will be dropped by R2. However, this synchronization rule can be turned off. You can safely turn this off if



  • You are not plannig to be a transit AS, that is having traffic from one AS to another AS over your AS.

  • All of your router is running BGP.


Split Horizon Rule

The split-horizon rule says that routes learned via IBPG won't be sent ot other IBGP peers. This rule is used to prevent loop in an AS. Consider the following scenario



R1 receives the network 12.10.0.0/16 from R4, which then will advertise the network to R2 and R3. What if then R2 sends the network to R3 and vice-versa. In IGP such as EIGRP and OSPF, the routers could determine the best path to the network, but BGP couldn't. This is because BGP doesn't use the metric like bandwidth or delay to determine the best path, instead it uses some attributes which will not change over IBGP routers in the same AS. So, if R2 and R3 ever send the 12.10.0.0/16 network to each other, they will end up having two routes with the same attribute, and therefore could potentially create a loop in the network. In Cisco routers, you could turn off this rule if you're sure that no potential loop will be created.


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