[isp-bgp] Re: Alternative transport protocol for BGP?

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@...]

On donderdag, apr 3, 2003, at 21:01 Europe/Amsterdam, Carl-Henrik 
Landgren wrote:

> What are the advantages and disadvantages of using TCP for BGP?
Advantages: we know how we should do TCP and it handles all transport 
issues so these don't have to be part of BGP. TCP also works well with 
IPsec. Since neighbors need to be explicitly configured, many neighbor 
discovery attacks are moot.

Disadvantages: TCP only works one-on-one, so the iBGP full mesh 
requirement is no fun, and in some situations the same goes for eBGP. 
And TCP doesn't know about records so working individual messages like 
BGP does is awkward and the performance isn't optimal. Neighbors need 
to be explicitly configured = management overhead.

> The last question what I've tried to get information about is, if we
> could use another transport protocol for BGP and what
> advantages/disadvantages would that protocol have?
Faster flooding of routing updates and no longer any need for 
confederations or route reflectors, possibly no longer any need to 
configure all existing routers in a confederation / all route 
reflectors if a new router is added.

However, doing this right requires lots of complexity so I'm not so 
sure if it's worth it.

> There have been some talk about a company named Packet Design which 
> have
> a protocol which they call BST(BGP Scalable Transport Protocol) that 
> fix
> some of the shortcomings with TCP, however I have limited information
> about this.
See