BGP path determination — which route to use

Firstly, recall that the number of available or supported routes is not set by the configuration but depends on your FortiGate’s available memory. All learned routes and their attributes come into the BGP router in raw form.

Before routes are installed in the routing table or are advertised to other routers, three levels of decisions must be made.

The three phases of BGP best path determination do not change. However, some manufacturers have added more information to the process, such as Cisco’s WEIGHT attribute to enable an administrator to force one route’s selection over another.

There is one Adj-RIB-IN and Adj-RIB-OUT for each configured neighbor. They are updated when the FortiGate unit receives BGP updates, or when the FortiGate unit sends out BGP updates.

 

Three phases of BGP routing decision

Decision phase 1

At this phase, the decision is to calculate how preferred each route and its NRLI are the Adjacent Routing Information Base Incoming (Adj-RIBs-In) compared to the other routes. For internal routes (IBGP), policy information or LOCAL_PREF is used. For external peer learned routes, it is based strictly on policy. These rules set up a list of which routes are most preferred going into Phase 2.

Decision phase 2

Phase 2 involves installing the best route to each destination into the local Routing Information Base (Loc-RIB). Effectively, the Loc-RIB is the master routing table. Each route from Phase 1 has their NEXT_HOP checked to ensure the destination is reachable. If it is reachable, the AS_PATH is checked for loops. After that, routes are installed based on the following decision process:

• If there is only one route to a location, it is installed.
• If multiple routes to the same location, use the most preferred route from Level 1.
• If there is a tie, break the tie based on the following in descending order of importance: shortest AS_PATH, smallest ORIGIN number, smallest MED, EBGP over IBGP, smallest metric or cost for reaching the NEXT_HOP, BGP identifier, and lowest IP address.

Note that the new routes that are installed into the Loc-RIB are in addition to any existing routes in the table. Once Phase 2 is completed the Loc-RIB will consist of the best of both the new and older routes.

 

Decision phase 3

Phase 3 is route distribution or dissemination. This is the process of deciding which routes the router will advertise. If there is any route aggregation or summarizing, it happens here. Also any route filtering from route maps happens here.

Once Phase 3 is complete, an update can be sent out to update the neighbor of new routes.

 

Aggregate routes and addresses

BGP4 allows classless routing, which uses netmasks as well as IP addresses. This classless routing enables the configuration of aggregate routes by stating the address bits the aggregated addresses have in common. For more information, see Dynamic Routing Overview on page 284.

The ATOMIC_AGGREGATE attribute informs routers that the route has been aggregated, and should not be de- aggregated. An associated AGGREGATOR attribute include the information about the router that did the aggregating including its AS.

The BGP commands associated with aggregate routes and addresses are:

config router bgp

config aggregate-address edit <aggr_addr_id>

set as-set {enable | disable}

set prefix <address_ipv4mask>

set summary-only {enable | disable}

end

config aggregate-address6 edit <aggr_addr_id>

set as-set {enable | disable}

set prefix6 <address_ipv6mask>

set summary-only {enable | disable}

end