RFC 1965 (rfc1965) - Page 1 of 7
Autonomous System Confederations for BGP
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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