Practical BGP

Foreword

Over lunch at the 12th IETF meeting in January 1989, Len Bosack, Kirk Lougheed, and myself came up with a protocol we called “A Border Gateway Protocol.” The outcome of what we produced was written on three napkins, giving BGP its unofficial title as the “Three Napkins Protocol.” Following lunch, Kirk and I expanded the context of the napkins into few handwritten pieces of paper (see p. x). In less than a month after the meeting, we came up with the first two interoperable implementations of BGP.

BGP was built around few fairly simple ideas. The first idea was to provide loop-free routing by carrying information about the path that the routing information traverses, and using this information to suppress routing information looping. ...