What Is BGP?

What Is BGP

Date First Published: 2nd April 2022

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Internet Protocols

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Advanced

Difficulty Level: 9/10

CONTENTS

Learn more about what BGP is in this article.

Short for Border Gateway Protocol, BGP is a protocol designed to make the internet function properly by enabling data routing across autonomous systems. It carries this out by taking a look at all the available paths that data could transfer and then choosing the best route. It makes these choices based on paths, network traffic, outages, network policies, and rules set by a network administrator. BGP is a path vector protocol as it chooses the route based on the path. It is not an interior gateway protocol for routing decisions.

BGP uses routing tables. These are text files that store the available routers by IP address. Routers that use BGP make use of these tables for the purpose of determining the best path for transferring data. In terms of updates, routing tables are updated on a frequent basis since the best route can change, based on paths, network traffic, outages, network policies, and rules set by a network administrator. There are some advantages of BGP. BGP has adaptability for network congestion, a standard method of communication between routers, and effective routing of data over the internet. Another role of BGP is to communicate the whole autonomous network path topology to other networks and to support classless interdomain routing, which allocates IP addresses to connected devices.

History

In 1989, BGP was first specified in RFC 1105. Since 1994, this protocol has been in use on the internet. In 1994, IPv6 BGP was specified in RFC 1654 and an improvement was made to it in 1998 to RFC 2283.

The current version of BGP is version 4, which was specified as RFC 4271 in 2006. The purpose of RFC 4271 was to fix errors and provide enhancements. A significant enhancement in version 4 was support for Classless Inter-Domain Routing as well as the use of route aggregation to decrease the size of routing tables.

TCP/IP Protocol
Application layer BGPDHCPDNSFTPHTTPIMAPLDAPMGCPNNTPNTPOSPFPOPPTPONC/RPCRTPRTSPRIPSIPSMTPSNMPSSHTelnetXMPP
Transport layer TCPUDPDCCPSCTPRSVPQUIC
Internet layer IPICMPNDPECNIGMP.
Link layer TunnelsPPPMAC


Feedback

  • Is there anything that you disagree with on this page?
  • Are there any spelling, grammatical, or punctuation errors on this page?
  • Are there any broken links or design errors on this page?

If so, it is important that you tell me as soon as possible on this page.