BGP Peers

The BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is an exterior protocol that maintains a list of IP addresses for exchanging internet routing information between autonomous systems. An autonomous syslem is a number of IP routing prefixes that are controlled by a single network operator that makes the routing information of that system public to the internet.

The route to our BGP peers is conflgured between routes in an autonomous system. A TCP session on port 179 establishes the peering and keep alive” messages are sent between peers to establish continued connectivity every minute by default. Each router will keep a routing table of the entire internet so that the best route for traffic can be determined.

BGP allows CatN and other large networks to talk to each other directly by choosing the fastest route for traffic based on network policies/rules and the route. BGP turns routes that have similar paths into a single route for advertisement to the rest of the internet, reducing CPU and RAM usage for advertising a network.

In the CatN infrastructure, the BGP allows us to exchange traffic directly to other large networks improving performance for vCluster users and reducing request latency by advertising the fastest route to these other large networks, many of which are ISP’s who peer with many other autonomous systems.