The Border Gateway Protocol was sketched out in 1989 by engineers on the back of "three ketchup-stained napkins", and is still known as the three-napkin protocol. It was first … See more

BGP is "the most scalable of all routing protocols."
An autonomous system with internal BGP (iBGP) must have all of its iBGP peers connect to each other in a full mesh (where everyone speaks to everyone directly). This full … See more

One of the largest problems faced by BGP, and indeed the Internet infrastructure as a whole, is the growth of the Internet routing table. If the global routing table grows to the point where some older, less capable routers cannot cope with the … See more

BGP neighbors, called peers, are established by manual configuration among routers to create a TCP session on port 179. … See more

Message header format
• Marker: Included for compatibility, must be set to all ones.
• Length: Total length of the message in octets, … See more

The routing tables managed by a BGP implementation are adjusted continually to reflect actual changes in the network, such as links or routers … See more

By design, routers running BGP accept advertised routes from other BGP routers by default. This allows for automatic and decentralized routing of traffic across the Internet, but it also leaves the Internet potentially vulnerable to accidental or malicious … See more