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BGP Optimal Route Reflection (BGP-ORR)
draft-ietf-idr-bgp-optimal-route-reflection-09

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 9107.
Authors Robert Raszuk , Christian Cassar , Erik Aman , Bruno Decraene , Stephane Litkowski
Last updated 2015-04-26
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
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Document shepherd Susan Hares
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Send notices to "Susan Hares" <shares@ndzh.com.>
draft-ietf-idr-bgp-optimal-route-reflection-09
IDR Working Group                                              R. Raszuk
Internet-Draft                                             Mirantis Inc.
Intended status: Standards Track                               C. Cassar
Expires: October 28, 2015                                  Cisco Systems
                                                                 E. Aman
                                                             TeliaSonera
                                                             B. Decraene
                                                            S. Litkowski
                                                                  Orange
                                                          April 26, 2015

                 BGP Optimal Route Reflection (BGP-ORR)
             draft-ietf-idr-bgp-optimal-route-reflection-09

Abstract

   [RFC4456] asserts that, because the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP)
   cost to a given point in the network will vary across routers, "the
   route reflection approach may not yield the same route selection
   result as that of the full IBGP mesh approach."  One practical
   implication of this assertion is that the deployment of route
   reflection may thwart the ability to achieve hot potato routing.  Hot
   potato routing attempts to direct traffic to the closest AS egress
   point in cases where no higher priority policy dictates otherwise.
   As a consequence of the route reflection method, the choice of exit
   point for a route reflector and its clients will be the egress point
   closest to the route reflector - and not necessarily closest to the
   RR clients.

   Section 11 of [RFC4456] describes a deployment approach and a set of
   constraints which, if satsified, would result in the deployment of
   route reflection yielding the same results as the iBGP full mesh
   approach.  Such a deployment approach would make route reflection
   compatible with the application of hot potato routing policy.

   As networks evolved to accommodate architectural requirements of new
   services, tunneled (LSP/IP tunneling) networks with centralized route
   reflectors became commonplace.  This is one type of common deployment
   where it would be impractical to satisfy the constraints described in
   Section 11 of [RFC4456].  Yet, in such an environment, hot potato
   routing policy remains desirable.

   This document proposes a new solution which can be deployed to
   facilitate the application of closest exit point policy in
   centralized route reflection deployments.

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Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on October 28, 2015.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Proposed solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Discussion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  Advantages and deployment considerations  . . . . . . . . . .   6
   5.  Security considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8

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1.  Introduction

   There are three types of BGP deployments within Autonomous Systems
   today: full mesh, confederations and route reflection.

   BGP route reflection is the most popular way to distribute BGP routes
   between BGP speakers belonging to the same administrative domain.
   Traditionally route reflectors have been deployed in the forwarding
   path and carefully placed on the POP to core boundaries.  That model
   of BGP route reflector placement has started to evolve.  The
   placement of route reflectors outside the forwarding path was
   triggered by applications which required traffic to be tunneled from
   AS ingress PE to egress PE: for example L3VPN.

   This evolving model of intra-domain network design has enabled
   deployments of centralized route reflectors.  Initially this model
   was only employed for new address families e.g.  L3VPNs, L2VPNs etc

   With edge to edge MPLS or IP encapsulation also being used to carry
   internet traffic, this model has been gradually extended to other BGP
   address families including IPv4 and IPv6 Internet routing.  This is
   also applicable to new services achieved with BGP as control plane
   for example 6PE.

   Such centralized route reflectors can be placed on the POP to core
   boundaries, but they are often placed in arbitrary locations in the
   core of large networks.

   Such deployments suffer from a critical drawback in the context of
   best path selection.  A route reflector with knowledge of multiple
   paths for a given prefix will typically (unless other techniques like
   add paths are in use) pick the best path and only advertise that best
   path to the the route reflector clients.  If the best path for a
   prefix is selected on the basis of an IGP tie break, the best path
   advertised from the route reflector to its clients will be the exit
   point closest to the route reflector.  But route reflector clients
   will be in a place in the network topology which is different from
   the route reflector.  In networks with centralized route reflectors,
   this difference will be even more acute.  It follows that the best
   path chosen by the route reflector is not necessarily the same as the
   path which would have been chosen by the client if the client
   considered the same set of candidate paths as the route reflector.
   Furthermore, the path chosen by the client might have been a better
   path from that chosen by the route reflector for traffic entering the
   network at the client.  The path chosen by the client would have
   guaranteed the lowest cost and delay trajectory through the network.

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   Route reflector clients switch packets using routing information
   learnt from route reflectors which are not on the forwarding path of
   the packet through the network even in the absence of end-to-end
   encapsulation.  In those cases the path chosen as best and propagated
   to the clients will often not be the optimal path chosen by the
   client given all available paths.

   Eliminating the IGP distance to the BGP nexthop as a tie breaker on
   centralized route reflectors does not address the issue.  Ignoring
   IGP distance to the BGP next hop results in the tie breaking
   procedure contributing the best path by differentiating between paths
   using attributes otherwise considered less important than IGP cost to
   the BGP nexthop.

   One possible valid solution or workaround to this problem requires
   sending all domain external paths from the RR to all its clients.
   This approach suffers the significant drawback of pushing a large
   amount of BGP state to all the edge routers.  In many networks, the
   number of EBGP peers over which full Internet routing information is
   received would correlate directly to the number of paths present in
   each ASBR.  This could easily result in tens of paths for each
   prefix.

   Notwithstanding this drawback, there are a number of reasons for
   sending more than just the single best path to the clients.  Improved
   path diversity at the edge is a requirement for fast connectivity
   restoration, and a requirement for effective BGP level load
   balancing.

   In practical terms, add/diverse path deployments are expected to
   result in the distribution of 2, 3 or n (where n is a small number)
   'good' paths rather than all domain external paths.  While the route
   reflector chooses one set of n paths and distributes those same n
   paths to all its route reflector clients, those n paths may not be
   the right n paths for all clients.  In the context of the problem
   described above, those n paths will not necessarily include the
   closest egress point out of the network for each route reflector
   client.  The mechanisms proposed in this document are likely to be
   complementary to mechanisms aimed at improving path diversity.

2.  Proposed solution

   This document proposes a simple solution to the problem described
   above - overwrite of the default IGP location placement of the route
   reflector - which is used for determining cost to the next hop
   contained in BGP paths.

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   The presented solution makes it possible for route reflector clients
   to direct traffic to their closest exit point in hot potato routing
   deployments, without requiring further state to be pushed out to the
   edge.  This solution is primarily applicable in deployments using
   centralized route reflectors, which are typically implemented in
   devices without a capable forwarding plane or which are being moved
   to the NFV enabled cloud.

   The solution rely upon all route reflectors learning all paths which
   are eligible for consideration for hot potato routing.  In order to
   satisfy this requirement, path diversity enhancing mechanisms such as
   add paths/diverse paths may need to be deployed between route
   reflectors.

   The core of the proposed solution is the ability for operator to
   specify on a per route reflector basis or per peer/update group basis
   or per neighbour basis the virtual IGP location placement allowing to
   have given group of clients to consider optimal distance to the next
   hops from the position of the configured virtual IGP location.  The
   choice of specific granularity is left to the implementation
   decision.  Implementation is considered as compliant with the
   document if it supports at least one listed grouping of virtual IGP
   placement.

   The computation of the virtual IGP location with any of the above
   described granularity is outside of the scope of this document.
   Operator may configure it manually, implementation may automate it
   based on specified heuristic or it can be computed centrally and
   configured by external system.

   By optimal we refer in this document to the decision made during best
   path selection at the IGP metric to BGP next hop comparison step.
   Clearly the overall path selection preference may be chosen based
   other policy step and provisions as defined in this document would
   not apply.

   A significant advantage of this approach is that the RR clients do
   not need to run new software or hardware.

3.  Discussion

   Determining the shortest path and associated cost between any two
   arbitrary points in a network based on the IGP topology learned by a
   router is expected to add some extra cost in terms of CPU resource.
   However SPF tree generation code is now implemented efficiently in a
   number of implementations, and therefor this is not expected to be a
   major drawback.  The number of SPTs computed in the general non-
   hierarchical case is expected to be of the order of the number of

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   clients of an RR whenever a topology change is detected.  Advanced
   optimizations like partial and incremental SPF may also be exploited.
   By the nature of route reflection, the number of clients can be split
   arbitrarily by the deployment of more route reflectors for a given
   number of clients.  While this is not expected to be necessary in
   existing networks with best in class route reflectors available
   today, this avenue to scaling up the route reflection infrastructure
   would be available.  If we consider the overall network wide cost/
   benefit factor, the only alternative to achieve the same level of
   optimality would require significantly increasing state on the edges
   of the network, which, in turn, will consume CPU and memory resources
   on all BGP speakers in the network.  Building this client perspective
   into the route reflectors seems appropriate.

4.  Advantages and deployment considerations

   The solution described provides a model for integrating the client
   perspective into the best path computation for RRs.  More
   specifically, the choice of BGP path factors in the IGP metric
   between the client and the nexthop, rather than the distance from the
   RR to the nexthop.  The documented method does not require any BGP or
   IGP protocol changes as required changes are contained within the RR
   implementation.

   This solution can be deployed in traditional hop-by-hop forwarding
   networks as well as in end-to-end tunneled environments.  In the
   networks where there are multiple route reflectors and hop-by-hop
   forwarding without encapsulation, such optimizations should be
   enabled in a consistent way on all route reflectors.  Otherwise
   clients may receive an inconsistent view of the network and in turn
   lead to intra-domain forwarding loops.

   With this approach, an ISP can effect a hot potato routing policy
   even if route reflection has been moved from the forwarding plane
   (example ABR) tothe core and hop-by-hop switching has been replaced
   by end to end MPLS or IP encapsulation.

   As per above, the approach reduces the amount of state which needs to
   be pushed to the edge in order to perform hot potato routing.  The
   memory and CPU resource required at the edge to provide hot potato
   routing using this approach is lower than what would be required in
   order to achieve the same level of optimality by pushing and
   retaining all available paths (potentially 10s) per each prefix at
   the edge.

   The proposal allows for a fast and safe transition to BGP control
   plane route reflection without compromising an operator's closest
   exit operational principle.  Hot potato routing is important to most

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   ISPs.  The inability to perform hot potato routing effectively stops
   migrations to centralized route reflection and edge-to-edge LSP/IP
   encapsulation for traffic to IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes.

   Regarding potential for intra-domain forwarding loops at ASBR level,
   this could be solved by enforcing external route preference or by
   performing tunnel to external interface switching action on ASBRs.

   Regarding client's IGP best-path selection, it should be self evident
   that this solution does not interfere with policies enforced above
   IGP tie breaking in the BGP best path algorithm.

   The solution applies to NLRIs of all address families which can be
   route reflected.

5.  Security considerations

   No new security issues are introduced to the BGP protocol by this
   specification.

6.  IANA Considerations

   IANA is requested to allocate a type code for the Standard BGP
   Community to be used for inter cluster propagation of angular
   position of the clients.

   IANA is requested to allocate a new type code from BGP OPEN Optional
   Parameter Types registry to be used for Group_ID propagation.

7.  Acknowledgments

   Authors would like to thank Keyur Patel, Eric Rosen, Clarence
   Filsfils, Uli Bornhauser, Russ White, Jakob Heitz, Mike Shand and Jon
   Mitchell for their valuable input.

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC4271]  Rekhter, Y., Li, T., and S. Hares, "A Border Gateway
              Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271, January 2006.

   [RFC4360]  Sangli, S., Tappan, D., and Y. Rekhter, "BGP Extended
              Communities Attribute", RFC 4360, February 2006.

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   [RFC5492]  Scudder, J. and R. Chandra, "Capabilities Advertisement
              with BGP-4", RFC 5492, February 2009.

8.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-idr-add-paths]
              Walton, D., Retana, A., Chen, E., and J. Scudder,
              "Advertisement of Multiple Paths in BGP", draft-ietf-idr-
              add-paths-10 (work in progress), October 2014.

   [RFC1997]  Chandrasekeran, R., Traina, P., and T. Li, "BGP
              Communities Attribute", RFC 1997, August 1996.

   [RFC1998]  Chen, E. and T. Bates, "An Application of the BGP
              Community Attribute in Multi-home Routing", RFC 1998,
              August 1996.

   [RFC4384]  Meyer, D., "BGP Communities for Data Collection", BCP 114,
              RFC 4384, February 2006.

   [RFC4456]  Bates, T., Chen, E., and R. Chandra, "BGP Route
              Reflection: An Alternative to Full Mesh Internal BGP
              (IBGP)", RFC 4456, April 2006.

   [RFC4893]  Vohra, Q. and E. Chen, "BGP Support for Four-octet AS
              Number Space", RFC 4893, May 2007.

   [RFC5283]  Decraene, B., Le Roux, JL., and I. Minei, "LDP Extension
              for Inter-Area Label Switched Paths (LSPs)", RFC 5283,
              July 2008.

   [RFC5668]  Rekhter, Y., Sangli, S., and D. Tappan, "4-Octet AS
              Specific BGP Extended Community", RFC 5668, October 2009.

   [RFC5714]  Shand, M. and S. Bryant, "IP Fast Reroute Framework", RFC
              5714, January 2010.

   [RFC6774]  Raszuk, R., Fernando, R., Patel, K., McPherson, D., and K.
              Kumaki, "Distribution of Diverse BGP Paths", RFC 6774,
              November 2012.

Authors' Addresses

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   Robert Raszuk
   Mirantis Inc.
   615 National Ave. #100
   Mt View, CA  94043
   USA

   Email: robert@raszuk.net

   Christian Cassar
   Cisco Systems
   10 New Square Park
   Bedfont Lakes, FELTHAM  TW14 8HA
   UK

   Email: ccassar@cisco.com

   Erik Aman
   TeliaSonera
   Marbackagatan 11
   Farsta  SE-123 86
   Sweden

   Email: erik.aman@teliasonera.com

   Bruno Decraene
   Orange
   38-40 rue du General Leclerc
   Issy les Moulineaux cedex 9  92794
   France

   Email: bruno.decraene@orange.com

   Stephane Litkowski
   Orange
   9 rue du chene germain
   Cesson Sevigne  35512
   France

   Email: stephane.litkowski@orange.com

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