What is BGP?

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of a family of IP Routing protocols, and is an Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) designed to distribute routing information between ASs.

EGPs are all vector routing protocols. In a vectoring protocol like BGP, the routers exchange network reachability information with their nearest neighbors. In other words, the routers communicate to each other the sets of addresses ("address prefixes") that they can reach, and the next hop address to which data should be sent in order to reach those addresses. This contrasts with link-state IGPs; the EGP routers exchange routes with one another, whereas the IGP routers exchange topology information and calculate their own routes locally.

The EGP floods reachability information through the Internet, so that every EGP router has a routing table containing address prefixes and next hops that cover the entire public Internet. The EGP has little or no knowledge of the end-to-end route; it only knows about the next hop along the route. Hence, the path along which data is forwarded is chosen based on a comparison of all available next hops.

Vector routing protocols scale much better than link-state routing protocols because the time taken to determine the best next hop is not a function of the number of nodes in the network, which makes them suitable for routing traffic on the backbone of the Internet.

An individual AS that wants to exchange routing information with other ASs will typically contain one or more BGP routers. Each BGP router is configured with the addresses of the BGP peers with which it is to exchange routing information.

When a connection to a peer is established, a BGP router sends all the routes in its local BGP routing table to that peer using UPDATE messages. The peer uses the contents of these messages to add new routes to its own local BGP routing table. If a BGP speaker learns more than one route to the same set of destinations, it runs a decision process over the competing routes to decide which is the most preferable. The most preferable route is then installed in the local BGP routing table, and is advertised to other BGP peers.

The routes in the BGP routing table are combined with routes learned from other routing protocols (for example, OSPF) to generate the complete routing table for the router. This routing table contains all the destinations the router knows about, associated with a next hop IP address and outgoing interface.

• BGP allows for routes to be modified before they are distributed to peers, through the use of implementation-specific policies.
  
  
• BGP uses timers to prevent a rapidly changing route from being continually advertised throughout the internet.
  
  
• BGP protocol exchanges can be authenticated so that only trusted routers can join in the routing exchanges.