BGPn

BGPn is a proposed extension to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) designed to address key limitations in inter-domain routing, including slow convergence, growth in routing table size, and vulnerabilities to misconfigurations and prefix hijacks. It seeks to maintain backward compatibility with existing BGP while introducing optional enhancements for incremental updates and stronger route validation.

Development of BGPn emerges from research and operator experimentation with inter-domain routing to improve efficiency and security in large-scale networks. While not yet standardized, early proposals describe a modular design that can be adopted gradually by operators and vendors.

Core ideas include support for incremental and bounded updates rather than full advertisements, optional cryptographic signing and validation of route announcements, and enhanced multi-path selection to enable safer traffic engineering. BGPn also envisions standardized mechanisms for policy-driven filtering and rapid withdrawal of invalid routes, reducing churn and memory pressure on route processors.

Architecturally, BGPn would run as a layered extension atop BGP-4, with a compatibility layer that ignores unknown messages on existing peers. Pilot deployments have been reported in research testbeds and some operator labs, but broad production use remains limited by standardization, interoperability, and performance considerations.

Potential benefits include faster convergence, improved security through route validation, reduced routing churn, and greater resilience to misconfigurations. Challenges include achieving consensus on a standard, ensuring compatibility with current BGP ecosystems, and assessing the real-world performance overhead of new cryptographic or validation processes.

See also:

- Border Gateway Protocol

- BGPsec

- RPKI

- Inter-domain routing