BGP Information for K-20 Customers

What is BGP?

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto routing protocol of the Internet. BGP allows different autonomous systems (AS – an organizational collection of routes) to exchange routing information and determine optimal paths and alternatives, which may be utilized in case of failure of an optimal path.

Requirements

In order to run BGP with K-20, participant sites will need to provide the following information to the K-20 NOC:

  1. Participant site’s Autonomous System Number (ASN)
    This can be requested from ARIN.
  2. The peering address that the site is planning to use
  3. The list of prefixes the site is planning to advertise to K-20
  4. Which routes K-20 should advertise to the site — the options are as follows:
    • Default + K-20 routes: ~80 prefixes
    • Default + K-20 + HP routes: ~20,000 prefixes
    • Full BGP table: over 920,000 prefixes and growing
      (Caution: many routers don’t have enough memory to carry a full table.)

Default + K-20 routes

This is the most common offering; this configuration includes a default route plus K-20 customer prefixes.

Default + K-20 + HP Routes

The second offering available to participants is a default route, K-20 customer routes, and high-performance (HP) routes. HP routes are a subset of customer and peer routes of the Pacific Northwest GigaPOP (PNWGP), the primary research and education network in the Pacific Northwest. HP routes include PNWGP’s private peerings as well as connection to Internet2 (I2).

Full BGP Table

Full feeds include all routes in the K-20 Customer and HP offerings, as well as commodity Internet routes.

Caution: many routers don’t have enough memory to carry a full table. A full BGP table requires at least 512 MB of router memory. Participants are encouraged to work with the K-20 engineering team to ensure their router meets the minimum requirements for a full BGP table.

Additional Help

K-20 engineering is happy to discuss the routing options listed above and answer other BGP-related questions. To start conversation, please contact the K-20 NOC.