Introduction to The Border Gateway Protocol – Case Study using GNS3 Sreenivasan Narasimhan1, Haniph Latchman2 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
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[email protected] Abstract – As the internet evolves to become a vital resource for many organizations, configuring The Border Gateway protocol (BGP) as an exterior gateway protocol in order to connect to the Internet Service Providers (ISP) is crucial. The BGP system exchanges network reachability information with other BGP peers from which Autonomous System-level policy decisions can be made. Hence, BGP can also be described as Inter-Domain Routing (Inter-Autonomous System) Protocol. It guarantees loop-free exchange of information between BGP peers. Enterprises need to connect to two or more ISPs in order to provide redundancy as well as to improve efficiency. This is called Multihoming and is an important feature provided by BGP. In this way, organizations do not have to be constrained by the routing policy decisions of a particular ISP. BGP, unlike many of the other routing protocols is not used to learn about routes but to provide greater flow control between competitive Autonomous Systems. In this paper, we present a study on BGP, use a network simulator to configure BGP and implement its route-manipulation techniques. Index Terms – Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Internet Service Provider (ISP), Autonomous System, Multihoming, GNS3. 1. INTRODUCTION Figure 1. Internet using BGP [2]. Routing protocols are broadly classified into two types – Link State In the figure, AS 65500 learns about the route 172.18.0.0/16 through routing (LSR) protocol and Distance Vector (DV) routing protocol.