<- RFC Index (4301..4400)
(also BCP 114)
Network Working Group D. Meyer
Request for Comments: 4384 February 2006
BCP: 114
Category: Best Current Practice
BGP Communities for Data Collection
Status of This Memo
This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).
Abstract
BGP communities (RFC 1997) are used by service providers for many
purposes, including tagging of customer, peer, and geographically
originated routes. Such tagging is typically used to control the
scope of redistribution of routes within a provider's network and to
its peers and customers. With the advent of large-scale BGP data
collection (and associated research), it has become clear that the
information carried in such communities is essential for a deeper
understanding of the global routing system. This memo defines
standard (outbound) communities and their encodings for export to BGP
route collectors.
Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 1]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Definitions .....................................................3
2.1. Peers and Peering ..........................................3
2.2. Customer Routes ............................................3
2.3. Peer Routes ................................................3
2.4. Internal Routes ............................................4
2.5. Internal More Specific Routes ..............................4
2.6. Special Purpose Routes .....................................4
2.7. Upstream Routes ............................................4
2.8. National Routes ............................................4
2.9. Regional Routes ............................................4
3. RFC 1997 Community Encoding and Values ..........................5
4. Community Values for BGP Data Collection ........................5
4.1. Extended Communities .......................................7
4.2. Four-Octet AS Specific Extended Communities ................9
5. Note on BGP UPDATE Packing ......................................9
6. Acknowledgements ................................................9
7. Security Considerations ........................................10
7.1. Total Path Attribute Length ...............................10
8. IANA Considerations ............................................10
9. References .....................................................11
9.1. Normative References ......................................11
9.2. Informative References ....................................11
1. Introduction
BGP communities [RFC1997] are used by service providers for many
purposes, including tagging of customer, peer, and geographically
originated routes. Such tagging is typically used to control the
scope of redistribution of routes within a provider's network and to
its customers and peers. Communities are also used for a wide
variety of other applications, such as allowing customers to set
attributes such as LOCAL_PREF [RFC1771] by sending appropriate
communities to their service provider. Other applications include
signaling various types of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) (e.g.,
Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) [VPLS]), and carrying link
bandwidth for traffic engineering applications [RFC4360].
With the advent of large-scale BGP data collection [RV] [RIS] (and
associated research), it has become clear that the geographical and
topological information, as well as the relationship the provider has
to the source of a route (e.g., transit, peer, or customer), carried
in such communities is essential for a deeper understanding of the
global routing system. This memo defines standard communities for
export to BGP route collectors. These communities represent a
significant part of information carried by service providers as of
Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 2]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006 this writing, and as such could be useful for internal use by service providers. However, such use is beyond the scope of this memo. Finally, those involved in BGP data analysis are encouraged to verify with their data sources as to which peers implement this scheme (as there is a large amount of existing data as well as many legacy peerings). The remainder of this memo is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the definition of terms used as well as the semantics of the communities used for BGP data collection, and Section 3 defines the corresponding encodings for RFC 1997 [RFC1997] communities. Finally, Section 4 defines the encodings for use with extended communities [RFC4360]. 2. Definitions In this section, we define the terms used and the categories of routes that may be tagged with communities. This tagging is often referred to as coloring, and we refer to a route's "color" as its community value. The categories defined here are loosely modeled on those described in [WANG] and [HUSTON]. 2.1. Peers and Peering Consider two network service providers, A and B. Service providers A and B are defined to be peers when (i) A and B exchange routes via BGP, and (ii) traffic exchange between A and B is settlement-free. This arrangement is also typically known as "peering". Peers typically exchange only their respective customer routes (see "Customer Routes" below), and hence exchange only their respective customer traffic. See [HUSTON] for a more in-depth discussion of the business models surrounding peers and peering. 2.2. Customer Routes Customer routes are those routes that are heard from a customer via BGP and are propagated to peers and other customers. Note that a customer can be an enterprise or another network service provider. These routes are sometimes called client routes [HUSTON]. 2.3. Peer Routes Peer routes are those routes heard from peers via BGP, and not propagated to other peers. In particular, these routes are only propagated to the service provider's customers. Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 3]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006 2.4. Internal Routes Internal routes are those routes that a service provider originates and passes to its peers and customers. These routes are frequently taken out of the address space allocated to a provider. 2.5. Internal More Specific Routes Internal more specific routes are those routes that are frequently used for circuit load balancing purposes and Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) route reduction. They also may correspond to customer services that are not visible outside the service provider's network. Internal more specific routes are not exported to any external peer. 2.6. Special Purpose Routes Special purpose routes are those routes that do not fall into any of the other classes described here. In those cases in which such routes need to be distinguished, a service provider may color such routes with a unique value. Examples of special purpose routes include anycast routes and routes for overlay networks. 2.7. Upstream Routes Upstream routes are typically learned from an upstream service provider as part of a transit service contract executed with the upstream provider. 2.8. National Routes These are route sets that are sourced from and/or received within a particular country. 2.9. Regional Routes Several global backbones implement regional policy based on their deployed footprint and on strategic and business imperatives. Service providers often have settlement-free interconnections with an Autonomous System (AS) in one region, and that same AS is a customer in another region. This mandates use of regional routing, including community attributes set by the network in question to allow easy discrimination among regional routes. For example, service providers may treat a route set received from another service provider in Europe differently than the same route set received in North America, as it is common practice to sell transit in one region while peering in the other. Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 4]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
3. RFC 1997 Community Encoding and Values
In this section, we provide RFC 1997 [RFC1997] community values for
the categories described above. RFC 1997 communities are encoded as
BGP Type Code 8, and are treated as 32-bit values ranging from
0x0000000 through 0xFFFFFFF. The values 0x0000000 through 0x0000FFFF
and 0xFFFF0000 through 0xFFFFFFFF are reserved.
The best current practice among service providers is to use the
high-order two octets to represent the provider's AS number, and the
low-order two octets to represent the classification of the route, as
depicted below:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| <AS> | <Value> |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
where <AS> is the 16-bit AS number. For example, the encoding
0x2A7C029A would represent the AS 10876 with value 666.
4. Community Values for BGP Data Collection
In this section, we define the RFC 1997 community encoding for the
route types described above for use in BGP data collection. It is
anticipated that a service provider's internal community values will
be converted to these standard values for output to a route
collector.
This memo follows the best current practice of using the basic format
<AS>:<Value>. The values for the route categories are described in
the following table:
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RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
Category Value
===============================================================
Reserved <AS>:0000000000000000
Customer Routes <AS>:0000000000000001
Peer Routes <AS>:0000000000000010
Internal Routes <AS>:0000000000000011
Internal More Specific Routes <AS>:0000000000000100
Special Purpose Routes <AS>:0000000000000101
Upstream Routes <AS>:0000000000000110
Reserved <AS>:0000000000000111-
<AS>:0000011111111111
National and Regional Routes <AS>:0000100000000000-
<AS>:1111111111111111
Encoded as <AS>:<R><X><CC>
Reserved National and Regional values <AS>:0100000000000000-
<AS>:1111111111111111
Where
<AS> is the 16-bit AS
<R> is the 5-bit Region Identifier
<X> is the 1-bit satellite link indication
X = 1 for satellite links, 0 otherwise
<CC> is the 10-bit ISO-3166-2 country code [ISO3166]
and <R> takes the values:
Africa (AF) 00001
Oceania (OC) 00010
Asia (AS) 00011
Antarctica (AQ) 00100
Europe (EU) 00101
Latin America/Caribbean Islands (LAC) 00110
North America (NA) 00111
Reserved 01000-11111
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RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
That is:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| <AS> | <R> |X| <CC> |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
For example, the encoding for a national route over a terrestrial
link in AS 10876 from the Fiji Islands would be:
<AS> = 10876 = 0x2A7C
<R> = 00010
<X> = 0
<CC> = Fiji Islands Country Code = 242 = 0011110010
In this case, the low-order 16 bits are 0001000011110010 = 0x10F2.
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| 0x2A7C | 0x10F2 |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Note that a configuration language might allow the specification of
this community as 10876:4338 (0x10F2 == 4338 decimal).
Finally, note that these categories are not intended to be mutually
exclusive, and multiple communities can be attached where
appropriate.
4.1. Extended Communities
In some cases, the values and their encoding described in Section 4
may clash with a service provider's existing community assignments.
Extended communities [RFC4360] provide a convenient mechanism that
can be used to avoid such clashes.
The Extended Communities attribute is a transitive optional BGP
attribute with the Type Code 16 and consists of a set of extended
communities of the following format:
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RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Type high | Type low(*) | |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Value |
| |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
For purposes of BGP data collection, we encode the communities
described in Section 4 using the two-octet AS specific extended
community type, which has the following format:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| 0x00 | Sub-Type | Global Administrator |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Local Administrator |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
The two-octet AS specific extended community attribute encodes the
service provider's two-octet Autonomous System number (as assigned by
a Regional Internet Registry, or RIR) in the Global Administrator
field, and the Local Administrator field may encode any information.
This memo assigns Sub-Type 0x0008 for BGP data collection, and
specifies that the <Value> field, as defined in Section 3.1, is
carried in the low-order octets of the Local Administrator field.
The two high-order octets of the Local Administrator field are
reserved, and are set to 0x00 when sending and ignored upon receipt.
For example, the extended community encoding for 10876:4338
(representing a terrestrial national route in AS 10876 from the Fiji
Islands) would be:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| 0x00 | 0x0008 | 0x2A7C |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| 0x00 | 0x00 | 0x10F2 |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 8]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
4.2. Four-Octet AS Specific Extended Communities
The four-octet AS specific extended community is encoded as follows:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| 0x02 | 0x0008 | Global Administrator |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Global Administrator (cont.) | 0x10F2 |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
In this case, the four-octet Global Administrator sub-field contains
a four-octet Autonomous System number assigned by the IANA.
5. Note on BGP UPDATE Packing
Note that data collection communities have the potential of making
the attribute set of a specific route more unique than it would be
otherwise (since each route collects data that is specific to its
path inside one or more ASes). This, in turn, can affect whether
multiple routes can be grouped in the same BGP update message, and it
may lead to increased use of bandwidth, router CPU cycles, and
memory.
6. Acknowledgements
The community encoding described in this memo germinated from an
interesting suggestion from Akira Kato at WIDE. In particular, the
idea would be to use the collection community values to select paths
that would result in (hopefully) more efficient access to various
services. For example, in the case of RFC 3258 [RFC3258] based DNS
anycast service, BGP routers may see multiple paths to the same
prefix, and others might be coming from the same origin with
different paths, but others might be from different region/country
(with the same origin AS).
Joe Abley, Randy Bush, Sean Donelan, Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Vijay
Gill, John Heasley, Geoff Huston, Steve Huter, Michael Patton,
Olivier Marce, Ryan McDowell, Rob Rockell, Rob Thomas, Pekka Savola,
Patrick Verkaik, and Alex Zinin all made many insightful comments on
early versions of this document. Henk Uijterwaal suggested the use
of the ISO-3166-2 country codes.
Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 9]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006 7. Security Considerations While this memo introduces no additional security considerations into the BGP protocol, the information contained in the communities defined in this memo may in some cases reveal network structure that was not previously visible outside the provider's network. As a result, care should be taken when exporting such communities to route collectors. Finally, routes exported to a route collector should also be tagged with the NO_EXPORT community (0xFFFFFF01). 7.1. Total Path Attribute Length The communities described in this memo are intended for use on egress to a route collector. Hence an operator may choose to overwrite its internal communities with the values specified in this memo when exporting routes to a route collector. However, operators should in general ensure that the behavior of their BGP implementation is well-defined when the addition of an attribute causes a PDU to exceed 4096 octets. For example, since it is common practice to use community attributes to implement policy (among other functionality such as allowing customers to set attributes such as LOCAL_PREF), the behavior of an implementation when the attribute space overflows is crucial. Among other behaviors, an implementation might usurp the intended attribute data or otherwise cause indeterminate failures. These behaviors can result in unanticipated community attribute sets, and hence result in unintended policy implications. 8. IANA Considerations This memo assigns a new Sub-Type for the AS specific extended community type in the First Come First Served extended transitive category. The IANA has assigned Sub-Type 0x0008 as defined in Section 4.1. In addition, the IANA has created two registries for BGP Data Collection Communities, one for standard communities and one for extended communities. Both of these registries will initially be populated by the values described in Section 4. IETF Consensus, as described in [RFC2434], usually through the Global Routing Operations Working Group (grow), is required for the assignment of new values in these registries (in particular, for <Value> or <R> in the table of values for the route categories in Section 4). Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 10]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006
9. References
9.1. Normative References
[ISO3166] "ISO 3166 Maintenance agency (ISO 3166/MA)", Web
Page: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/
iso3166ma/index.html, 2004.
[RFC1771] Rekhter, Y. and T. Li (Editors), "A Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP-4)", RFC 1771, March 1995.
[RFC1997] Chandra, R. and P. Traina, "BGP Communities
Attribute", RFC 1997, August 1996.
[RFC4360] Sangli, S., Tappan, D., and Y. Rekhter, "BGP Extended
Communities Attribute", RFC 4360, January 2006.
9.2. Informative References
[HUSTON] Huston, G., "Interconnection, Peering, and
Settlements",
http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/1e/1e_1.htm
[RFC2434] Narten, T., and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for
Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP
26, RFC 2434, October 1998.
[RFC3258] Hardie, T., "Distributing Authoritative Name Servers
via Shared Unicast Addresses", RFC 3258, April 2002.
[RIS] "The RIPE Routing Information Service", Web Page:
http://www.ripe.net/ris, 2004.
[RV] Meyer, D., "The Routeviews Project", Web Page:
http://www.routeviews.org, 2002.
[VPLS] Kompella, K., et al., "Virtual Private LAN Service",
Work in Progress, April 2005.
[WANG] Wang, F. and L. Gao, "Inferring and Characterizing
Internet Routing Policies", ACM SIGCOMM Internet
Measurement Conference 2003.
Author's Address
David Meyer
EMail: dmm@1-4-5.net
Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 11]
RFC 4384 BGP Communities for Data Collection February 2006 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights. This document and the information contained herein are provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM 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. Intellectual Property The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has made any independent effort to identify any such rights. Information on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be found in BCP 78 and BCP 79. Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at http://www.ietf.org/ipr. The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement this standard. Please address the information to the IETF at ietf-ipr@ietf.org. Acknowledgement Funding for the RFC Editor function is provided by the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA). Meyer Best Current Practice [Page 12]