RFC 1266 (rfc1266) - Page 2 of 9

Experience with the BGP Protocol

RFC 1266            Experience with the BGP Protocol        October 1991


4. Documentation.

   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 [3]. The
   changes between versions 1, 2 and 3 are explained in Appendix 3 of
   [3].  Most of the functionality that was present in the Version 1 is
   present in the Version 2 and 3.  Changes between Version 1 and
   Version 2 affect mostly the format of the BGP messages.  Changes
   between Version 2 and Version 3 are quite minor.

   BGP Version 2 removed from the protocol the concept of "up", "down",
   and "horizontal" relations between autonomous systems that were
   present in the Version 1.  BGP Version 2 introduced the concept of
   path attributes.  In addition, BGP Version 2 clarified parts of the
   protocol that were "underspecified".  BGP Version 3 lifted some of
   the restrictions on the use of the NEXT_HOP path attribute, and added
   the BGP Identifier field to the BGP OPEN message. It also clarifies
   the procedure for distributing BGP routes between the BGP speakers
   within an autonomous system.  Possible applications of BGP in the
   Internet are documented in [2].

   The BGP protocol was developed by the IWG/BGP Working Group of the
   Internet Engineering Task Force. This Working Group has a mailing
   list, , where discussions of protocol features and
   operation are held. The IWG/BGP Working Group meets regularly during
   the quarterly Internet Engineering Task Force conferences. Reports of
   these meetings are published in the IETF's Proceedings.

5. MIB

   A BGP Management Information Base has been published [4].  The MIB
   was written by Steve Willis () and John Burruss
   ().

   Apart from a few system variables, the BGP MIB is broken into two
   tables: the BGP Peer Table and the BGP Received Path Attribute Table.
   The Peer Table reflects information about BGP peer connections, such
   as their state and current activity. The Received Path Attribute
   Table contains all attributes received from all peers before local
   routing policy has been applied. The actual attributes used in
   determining a route are a subset of the received attribute table.

   The BGP MIB is quite small. It contains total of 27 objects.






BGP Working Group