Autonomous System Confederations for BGP
RFC 1965
Document | Type |
RFC - Experimental
(June 1996; No errata)
Obsoleted by RFC 3065
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Author | Paul Traina | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | IETF | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | WG state | (None) | |
Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 1965 (Experimental) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group P. Traina Request for Comments: 1965 cisco Systems Category: Experimental June 1996 Autonomous System Confederations for BGP Status of this Memo This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract Border Gateway Protocol [1] is an inter-autonomous system routing protocol designed for TCP/IP networks. This document describes an extension to BGP which may be used to create a confederation of autonomous systems which is represented as one single autonomous system to BGP peers external to the confederation. The intention of this extension is to aid in policy administration and reduce the management complexity of maintaining a large autonomous system. The extension this document describes is widely deployed in the Internet today. Introduction It may be useful to subdivide autonomous systems with a very large number of BGP speakers into smaller domains for purposes of controlling routing policy via information contained in the BGP AS_PATH attribute. For example, one may chose to consider all BGP speakers in a geographic region as a single entity. In addition to improvements in routing policy control, current techniques for deploying BGP among speakers in the same autonomous system establish a full mesh of TCP connections among all speakers for the purpose of exchanging exterior routing information. In autonomous systems the number of intra-domain connections that need to be maintained by each border router can become significant. Subdividing a large autonomous system allows a significant reduction in the total number of intra-domain BGP connections, as the Traina Experimental [Page 1] RFC 1965 AS Confederations for BGP June 1996 connectivity requirements simplify to the model used for inter-domain connections. Unfortunately subdividing an autonomous system may increase the complexity of policy routing based on AS_PATH information for all members of the Internet. Additionally, this division increases the maintenance overhead of coordinating external peering when the internal topology of this collection of autonomous systems is modified. Finally, dividing a large AS may unnecessarily increase the length of the sequence portions of the AS_PATH attribute. Several common BGP implementations can use the number of "hops" required to reach a given destination as part of the path selection criteria. While this is not an optimal method of determining route preference, given the lack of other in-band information, it provides a reasonable default behavior which is widely used across the Internet. Therefore, division of an autonomous system into separate systems may adversely affect optimal routing of packets through the Internet. However, there is usually no need to expose the internal topology of this divided autonomous system, which means it is possible to regard a collection of autonomous systems under a common administration as a single entity or autonomous system when viewed from outside the confines of the confederation of autonomous systems itself. Terms and Definitions AS Confederation A collection of autonomous systems advertised as a single AS number to BGP speakers that are not members of the confederation. AS Confederation Identifier An externally visible autonomous system number that identifies the confederation as a whole. Member-AS An autonomous system that is contained in a given AS confederation. Overview IDRP[2] has the concept of a routing domain confederation. An IDRP routing domain confederation appears to IDRP speakers external to the confederation as a single administrative entity. This extension is based upon that work. Traina Experimental [Page 2] RFC 1965 AS Confederations for BGP June 1996 In IDRP, routing domain confederations may be nested within each other or disjoint portions of still larger confederations. The algorithm BGP defines for additions to the AS_PATH attribute imposes an additional restriction that AS confederations must be strictly hierarchical in nature. AS_CONFED segment type extension Currently, BGP specifies that the AS_PATH attribute is a well-known mandatory attribute that is composed of a sequence of AS path segments. Each AS path segment is represented by a type/length/value triple. In [1], the path segment type is a 1-octet long field with the twoShow full document text