Recent BGP Innovations for Operational Challenges

A lot of progress has been made in the IETF IDR and GROW Working Groups over the last year to address BGP operational challenges. Several new proposals that solve …

A lot of progress has been made in the IETF IDR and GROW Working Groups over the last year to address BGP operational challenges. Several new proposals that solve operational problems were introduced in collaboration between network operators and implementation developers. Cooperation between IETF participants to refine the ideas has helped the rapid development of several new standards that make BGP more reliable and easier to manage for network operators.

In this presentation we’ll talk about six recent BGP innovations that help network operators solve some of the BGP operational challenges they are facing.

1. RFC 8092, BGP Large Communities Attribute, defines the BGP Large Communities Attribute, a novel new way to signal information between networks. Large Communities improve the functionality of classic BGP communities (RFC 1997) and extend communities for use with 32-bit ASNs.

2. RFC 8212, Default External BGP (EBGP) Route Propagation Behavior without Policies, changes the default behavior of a BGP speaker to not use or send routes on EBGP sessions, when there is no import or export policy configured.

3. RFC 8203, BGP Administrative Shutdown Communication, defines a mechanism to send a short freeform message to describe why a BGP session was shutdown or reset.

4. draft-ietf-grow-bgp-gshut, Graceful BGP session shutdown, defines a well-known BGP community to signal the graceful shutdown of a BGP peering session.

5. draft-ietf-grow-bgp-session-culling, Mitigating Negative Impact of Maintenance through BGP Session Culling, defines an approach to ensure that BGP sessions are shut down before maintenance on a lower layer network, for example a Layer 2 IXP fabric.

6. RFC 7999, BLACKHOLE Community, defines a well-known BGP community for destination-based blackholing in IP networks.