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 Border Gateway Protocol (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)
  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. Choose which routes K-20 should advertise to the site – the options are as follows:
  • Default plus K-20 routes ~ 80 prefixes
  • Default plus K-20 plus HP routes ~ 20,000 prefixes
  • Full BGP table ~ over 690,00 prefixes and growing (a lot of routers don’t have enough
    memory to carry a full table so that’s something to bear in mind).

Default plus K-20 routes

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

Default plus K-20 plus 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 K-20 network has an upstream connection with 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

A full BGP table requires at least 512mb 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 feed. Full feeds include all routes in the K-20 Customer and HP offerings, as well as commodity Internet routes.

Additional Help

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