BGP Protocol Analysis

This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. 2. Introduction. The purpose of this report is to document how the requirements for advancing a routing protocol to Draft Standard have been satisfied by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This report summarizes the key feature of BGP, and analyzes the protocol with respect to scaling and performance. This is the first of two reports on the BGP protocol. BGP is an inter-autonomous system routing protocol designed for the TCP/IP internets. Version 1 of the BGP protocol was published in RFC 1105. Since then BGP versions 2 and 3 have been developed. Version 2 was documented in RFC 1163. Version 3 is documented in [1]. The changes between versions 1, 2 and 3 are explained in Appendix 3 of [1]. Possible applications of BGP in the Internet are documented in [2]. The BGP protocol has been developed by the IWG/BGP Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force. We would like to express our deepest thanks to Guy Almes (Rice University) who was the previous chairman of the IWG Working Group. We also like to explicitly thank Bob Braden (ISI) and Bob Hinden (BBN) for the review of this document as well as their constructive and valuable comments. 4. Key features and algorithms of the BGP protocol. This section summarizes the key features and algorithms of the BGP protocol. BGP is an inter-autonomous system routing protocol; it is designed to be used between multiple autonomous systems. BGP assumes that routing within an autonomous system is done by an intra-autonomous system routing protocol. BGP does not make any assumptions BGP Working Group [Page 1]