RFC 2918

Network Working Group E. Chen
Request for Comments: 2918 Redback Networks
Category: Standards Track September 2000

Route Refresh Capability for BGP-4

Status of this Memo

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

This document defines a new Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) capability
termed 'Route Refresh Capability', which would allow the dynamic
exchange of route refresh request between BGP speakers and subsequent
re-advertisement of the respective Adj-RIB-Out. One possible
application of this capability is to facilitate non-disruptive
routing policy changes.

1. Introduction

Currently there does not exist a mechanism in BGP-4 [BGP-4] to
dynamically request a re-advertisement of the Adj-RIB-Out from a BGP
peer. When the inbound routing policy for a peer changes, all
prefixes from that peer must be somehow made available and then re-
examined against the new policy. To accomplish this, a commonly used
approach, known as 'soft-reconfiguration', is to store an unmodified
copy of all routes from that peer at all times, even though routing
policies do not change frequently (typically no more than a couple
times a day). Additional memory and CPU are required to maintain
these routes.

This document proposes an alternative solution that avoids the
additional maintenance cost. More specifically, it defines a new BGP
capability termed 'Route Refresh Capability', which would allow the
dynamic exchange of route refresh request between BGP speakers and
subsequent re-advertisement of the respective Adj-RIB-Out.

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RFC 2918 Route Refresh for BGP-4 September 2000

2. Route Refresh Capability

To advertise the Route Refresh Capability to a peer, a BGP speaker
uses BGP Capabilities Advertisement [BGP-CAP]. This capability is
advertised using the Capability code 2 and Capability length 0.

By advertising the Route Refresh Capability to a peer, a BGP speaker
conveys to the peer that the speaker is capable of receiving and
properly handling the ROUTE-REFRESH message (as defined in Section 3)
from the peer.

3. Route-REFRESH Message

The ROUTE-REFRESH message is a new BGP message type defined as
follows:

Type: 5 - ROUTE-REFRESH

Message Format: One encoded as

0 7 15 23 31
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| AFI | Res. | SAFI |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+

The meaning, use and encoding of this field is the
same as defined in [BGP-MP, sect. 7]. More specifically,

AFI - Address Family Identifier (16 bit).

Res. - Reserved (8 bit) field. Should be set to 0 by the
sender and ignored by the receiver.

SAFI - Subsequent Address Family Identifier (8 bit).

4. Operation

A BGP speaker that is willing to receive the ROUTE-REFRESH message
from its peer should advertise the Route Refresh Capability to the
peer using BGP Capabilities advertisement [BGP-CAP].

A BGP speaker may send a ROUTE-REFRESH message to its peer only if it
has received the Route Refresh Capability from its peer. The carried in such a message should be one of the that
the peer has advertised to the speaker at the session establishment
time via capability advertisement.

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RFC 2918 Route Refresh for BGP-4 September 2000

If a BGP speaker receives from its peer a ROUTE-REFRESH message with
the that the speaker didn't advertise to the peer at the
session establishment time via capability advertisement, the speaker
shall ignore such a message. Otherwise, the BGP speaker shall re-
advertise to that peer the Adj-RIB-Out of the carried in
the message, based on its outbound route filtering policy.

5. Security Considerations

This extension to BGP does not change the underlying security issues.

6. Acknowledgments

The concept of Route Refresh proposed is similar to the one used in
IDRP.

The author would like to thank Yakov Rekhter, Ravi Chandra, Srihari
Ramachandra and Bruce Cole for their review and comments.

7. References

[BGP-4] Rekhter, Y. and T. Li, "A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-
4)", RFC 1771, March 1995.

[BGP-MP] Bates, T., Chandra, R., Katz, D. and Y. Rekhter,
"Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4", RFC 2858, June 2000.

[BGP-CAP] Chandra, R. and J. Scudder, "Capabilities Advertisement
with BGP-4", RFC 2842, May 2000.

8. Author's Address

Enke Chen
Redback Networks Inc.
350 Holger Way
San Jose, CA 95134

EMail: enke@redback.com

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RFC 2918 Route Refresh for BGP-4 September 2000

9. Full Copyright Statement

This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
English.

The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
"AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgement

Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.

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