Background Information

Routing protocols are not just packets transmitted over a network, but comprise all the mechanisms by which individual routers, and groups of routers, discover, organize, and communicate network topologies. Routing protocols use distributed algorithms that depend on each participant following the protocol as it is specified, and are most useful when routes within a network domain dynamically change as links between network nodes change state.

Routing protocols typically interact with two databases:

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Routing Information Base (RIB) - Used to store all the route information required by the routing protocols themselves.
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Forward Information Base (FIB) - Used for actual packet forwarding.

The best routes chosen from the RIB are used to populate the FIB. Both the RIB and FIB change dynamically as routing updates are received by each routing protocol, or connectivity on the device changes.

There are two basic classes of routing protocols:

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Interior Gateway Protocols (IGPs) - Interior Gateway Protocols are routing protocols designed to communicate routes within the networks that exist inside of an AS. There are two generations of IGPs. The first generation consists of distance-vector protocols. The second generation consists of link-state protocols. The distance-vector protocols are relatively simple, but have issues when scaled to a large number of routers. The link-state protocols are more complex, but have better scaling capability. The existing distance-vector protocols are Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP), Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Routing Information Protocol (RIP), and RIPv2, an enhanced version of RIP. IGRP and EIGRP are proprietary Cisco protocols. The link-state protocols currently in use are Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and the little-used Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocol.

SonicOS supports OSPFv2 and RIPv1/v2 protocols, the two most common routing Interior Gateway Protocols, allowing our customers to use our products in their IGP networks and avoid the additional cost of a separate traditional router.

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Exterior Gateway Protocols (EGPs) - The standard, ubiquitous Exterior Gateway Protocol is BGP (BGP4, to be exact). BGP is large-scale routing protocol that communicates routing information and policy between well-defined network domains called Autonomous Systems (ASs). An Autonomous System is a separately administered network domain, independent of other Autonomous Systems. BGP is used to convey routes and route policy between Autonomous Systems. ISPs commonly use BGP to convey routes and route policy with their customers as well as with other ISPs.

Each Autonomous System has a 16-bit number assigned. Like IP addresses, an AS number may be public or private. Public AS numbers are a limited resource and are provisioned based on a number of factors. ISP customers with large networks multi-homed to two or more ISPs usually have a public AS, whereas smaller customers will be given a private AS administered by their ISP provider.

As our products evolve in support of enterprise-level requirements, some customers may want to place our products on the edge of their AS in place of a traditional BGP router. To support these topologies, BGP has been added.

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NOTE: SonicOS supports BGP4+, or IPv6 support in BGP4 (RFC 2545), on platforms that support BGP.