| Routing involves two activities:
determining the optimum path to every destination in the network,
and transporting groups of information typically called packets
through the network. While transporting packets through an
internetwork is relatively straightforward on the surface,
determining the best path to every destination within the network
can be very complex.
Routers use routing protocols to
speak among themselves and determine the best path to the various
destinations within the network (or internetwork, which is simply a
large collection of networks); one of these routing protocols is the
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP performs interdomain routing in
TCP/IP networks.
This chapter summarizes the basic operations of BGP and provides a
description of its protocol components.
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