Border

Gateway
Protocol
By
Brendan Parks
Joey Opinski
Chris
 History
• Designed to replace EGP protocol to
allow fully decentralized routing
– EGP (Exterior Gateway Protocol) was the
first routing protocol of the internet that was
limited to tree-like topologies
• Since 1994, version 4 of BGP has been
used on the internet

Picture: Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), Creators of EGP

 What does it do?
• When a BGP router connects for the first time
or after being turned off, it downloads the
entire routing tables of neighboring BGP
routers
• Routers exchange update messages to
indicate a change in a preferred path to reach
a computer with a given IP address
– When routers update their own tables, they send
out update messages to neighboring routers as
well
How is the best path determined?

• BGP broadcasts a 19-byte keep-alive

message at 30-60 (or whatever) second
intervals
– If routers do not receive message, they
disconnect and remove them from their
routing tables
• When routers come up with better path,
they send out better path to neighboring
routers in an update message
 Bandwidth Overhead
• There will be moderate bandwidth
overhead
– Caused by the constant updating of routing
tables, keep-alive messages, and the sort
– Nothing remains static
 Type of LAN Used
• BGP is used in external LANs and
internal LANs
• Most commonly used in external for
determining best path, but also used for
big internal LANs for big companies and
whatnot