Summary

The Border Gateway Protocol defines the basis of routing architectures in the Internet. The segregation of networks into autonomous systems has logically defined the administrative and political borders between organizations. Interior Gateway Protocols can now run independently of each other, but still interconnect via BGP to provide global routing.

With this chapter, you learned the practical implementation details for BGP as part of the overall design problem in building reliable Internet connectivity. This chapter examined specific attributes of BGP and how they are applied individually and together to address this design problem. Although the terminology, attributes, and details of this chapter are specific to BGP, the general concepts and problems raised are pertinent to routing architecture design, regardless of what specific protocols are being utilized.