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Route Target Constrained Distribution of Routes with no Route Targets
draft-ietf-idr-rtc-no-rt-01

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Expired".
Authors Eric C. Rosen , Keyur Patel , Jeffrey Haas , Robert Raszuk
Last updated 2015-10-14 (Latest revision 2015-06-29)
Replaces draft-rosen-idr-rtc-no-rt
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draft-ietf-idr-rtc-no-rt-01
IDR Working Group                                          E. Rosen, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                    Juniper Networks, Inc.
Intended status: Standards Track                                K. Patel
Expires: December 31, 2015                           Cisco Systems, Inc.
                                                                 J. Haas
                                                  Juniper Networks, Inc.
                                                               R. Raszuk
                                                           Mirantis Inc.
                                                           June 29, 2015

 Route Target Constrained Distribution of Routes with no Route Targets
                    draft-ietf-idr-rtc-no-rt-01.txt

Abstract

   BGP routes sometimes carry an "Extended Communities" path attribute.
   An Extended Communities path attribute can contain one or more "Route
   Targets" (RTs).  By means of a procedure known as "RT Constrained
   Distribution" (RTC), a BGP speaker can send BGP UPDATE messages that
   express its interest in a particular set of RTs.  Generally, RTC has
   been applied only to address families whose routes always carry RTs.
   When RTC is applied to such an address family, a BGP speaker
   expressing its interest in a particular set of RTs is indicating that
   it wants to receive all and only the routes of that address family
   that have at least one of the RTs of interest.  However, there are
   scenarios in which the originator of a route chooses not to include
   any RTs at all, assuming that the distribution of a route with no RTs
   at all will be unaffected by RTC.  This has led to interoperability
   problems in the field, where the originator of a route assumes that
   RTC will not affect the distribution of the route, but intermediate
   BGP speakers refuse to distribute that route because it does not
   carry any RT of interest.  The purpose of this document is to clarify
   the effect of the RTC mechanism on routes that do not have any RTs.

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

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   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 December 31, 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  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Some Deployment Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Default Behavior  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   6.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     6.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     6.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6

1.  Introduction

   A BGP route can carry a particular type of BGP path attribute known
   as an "Extended Communities Attribute" [RFC4360].  Each such
   attribute can contain a variable number of typed communities.
   Certain typed communities are known as "Route Targets" (RTs)
   ([RFC4360], [RFC4364]).

   [RFC4684] defines a procedure, known as "RT Constrained Distribution"
   (RTC) that allows a BGP speaker to advertise its interest in a
   particular set of RTs.  It does so by advertising "RT membership
   information".  (See [RFC4684] for details.)  It may advertise RT
   membership for any number of RTs.  By advertising membership for a
   particular RT, a BGP speaker declares that it is interested in
   receiving BGP routes that carry that RT.

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   If RTC is enabled on a particular BGP session, the session must be
   provisioned with the set of "address family" and "subsequent address
   family" (AFI/SAFIs) values to which RTC is to be applied.  In
   [RFC4684] it is implicitly assumed that RTC will only by applied to
   AFI/SAFIs where all the routes carry RTs.  When this assumption is
   true, the RTC semantics are clear.  A BGP speaker advertising its
   interest in RT1, RT2, ..., RTk is saying that, for the AFI/SAFIs to
   which RTC is being applied, it is interested in any route that
   carries at least one of those RTs, and it is not interested in any
   route that does not carry at least one of those RTs.

   However, [RFC4684] does not specify how the RTC procedures are to be
   applied to address families whose routes sometimes carry RTs and
   sometimes do not.  Consider a BGP session between routers R1 and R2,
   where R1 has advertised its interest in RT1, RT2, ..., RTk, and RTC
   is being applied to a particular AFI/SAFI.  Suppose R2 has a route of
   that AFI/SAFI, and that route carries no RTs.  Should R2 advertise
   this route to R1 or not?

   There are two different answers to this question, each of which seems
   prima facie reasonable:

   o  No, R2 should not advertise the route, because it belongs to an
      AFI/SAFI to which RTC is being applied, and the route does carry
      any of the RTs in which R1 is interested.

   o  Yes, R2 should advertise the route; since the route carries no
      RTs, the intention of the route's originator is that the
      distribution of the route not be constrained by the RTC mechanism.

   As might be expected, "one size does not fit all", and the best
   answer depends upon the particular deployment scenario, and upon the
   particular AFI/SAFI to which RTC is being applied.

   Section 3 defines a default behavior for each existing AFI/SAFI.
   This default behavior will ensure proper operation of that AFI/SAFI
   when RTC is applied.  The default behavior may of course be
   overridden by a local policy.

   Section 3 also defines a default "default behavior" for new AFI/
   SAFIs.  When a new AFI/SAFI is defined, the specification defining it
   may specify a different default behavior; otherwise the default
   default behavior will apply.

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

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2.  Some Deployment Scenarios

   There are at least three deployment scenarios where lack of a clearly
   defined default behavior for RTC is problematic.

   o  [RFC6037] describes a deployed Multicast VPN (MVPN) solution.  It
      defines a BGP address family known as "MDT-SAFI".  Routes of this
      address family may carry RTs, but are not required to do so.  In
      order for the RFC6037 procedures to work properly, if an MDT-SAFI
      route does not carry any RTs, the distribution of that route must
      not be constrained by RTC.  However, if an MDT-SAFI route does
      carry one or more RTs, its distribution may be constrained by RTC.

   o  [GTM] specifies a way to provide "global table" (as opposed to
      VPN) multicast, using procedures that are very similar to those
      described in [RFC6513] and [RFC6514] for MVPN.  In particular, it
      uses routes of the MCAST-VPN address family that is defined in
      [RFC6514].  When used for MVPN, each MCAST-VPN route carries at
      least one RT.  However, when used for global table multicast, it
      is optional for certain MCAST-VPN route types to carry RTs.  In
      order for the procedures of [GTM] to work properly, if an MCAST-
      VPN route does not carry any RTs, the distribution of that route
      must not be constrained by RTC.

   o  Typically, Route Targets have been carried only by routes that are
      distributed as part of a VPN service.  However, it may be
      desirable to be able to place RTs on non-VPN routes (e.g., on
      unicast IPv4 or IPv6 routes) and then to use RTC to constrain the
      delivery of the non-VPN routes.  For example, if a BGP speaker
      desires to receive only a small set of IPv4 unicast routes, and
      the desired routes carry one or more RTs, the BGP speaker could
      use RTC to advertise its interest in one or more of those RTs.  In
      this application, the intention would be that any IPv4 unicast
      route not carrying an RT would be filtered.  Note that this is the
      opposite of the behavior needed for the other use cases discussed
      in this section.

3.  Default Behavior

   In order to handle the use cases discussed in Section 3, this
   document specifies a default behavior for the case where RTC is
   applied to a particular address family (AFI/SAFI), and some (or all)
   routes of that address family do not carry any RTs.

   When RTC is applied, on a particular BGP session, to routes of the
   MDT-SAFI address family (SAFI=66), the default behavior is that
   routes that do not carry any RTs are distributed on that session.

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   When RTC is applied, on a particular BGP session, to routes of the
   MCAST-VPN address family (SAFI=5), the default behavior is that
   routes that do not carry any RTs are distributed on that session.

   When RTC is applied, on a particular BGP session, to routes of other
   address families, the default behavior is that routes without any RTs
   are not distributed on that session.  This default "default behavior"
   applies to all AFI/SAFIs for which a different default behavior has
   not been defined.

   A BGP speaker may be provisioned to apply a non-default behavior to a
   given AFI/SAFI.  This is a matter of local policy.

4.  IANA Considerations

   This document contains no actions for IANA.

5.  Security Considerations

   No security considerations are raised by this document beyond those
   already discussed in [RFC4684].

6.  References

6.1.  Normative References

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

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

   [RFC4684]  Marques, P., Bonica, R., Fang, L., Martini, L., Raszuk,
              R., Patel, K., and J. Guichard, "Constrained Route
              Distribution for Border Gateway Protocol/MultiProtocol
              Label Switching (BGP/MPLS) Internet Protocol (IP) Virtual
              Private Networks (VPNs)", RFC 4684, November 2006.

6.2.  Informative References

   [GTM]      Zhang, J., Giulano, L., Rosen, E., Subramanian, K.,
              Pacella, D., and J. Schiller, "Global Table Multicast with
              BGP-MVPN Procedures", internet-draft draft-ietf-l3vpn-
              mvpn-global-table-mcast-01, May 2015.

   [RFC4364]  Rosen, E. and Y. Rekhter, "BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private
              Networks (VPNs)", RFC 4364, February 2006.

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   [RFC6037]  Rosen, E., Cai, Y., and IJ. Wijnands, "Cisco Systems'
              Solution for Multicast in BGP/MPLS IP VPNs", RFC 6037,
              October 2010.

   [RFC6513]  Rosen, E. and R. Aggarwal, "Multicast in MPLS/BGP IP
              VPNs", RFC 6513, February 2012.

   [RFC6514]  Aggarwal, R., Rosen, E., Morin, T., and Y. Rekhter, "BGP
              Encodings and Procedures for Multicast in MPLS/BGP IP
              VPNs", RFC 6514, February 2012.

Authors' Addresses

   Eric C. Rosen (editor)
   Juniper Networks, Inc.
   10 Technology Park Drive
   Westford, Massachusetts  01886
   USA

   Email: erosen@juniper.net

   Keyur Patel
   Cisco Systems, Inc.
   170 Tasman Drive
   San Jose, California  95134
   US

   Email: keyupate@cisco.com

   Jeffrey Haas
   Juniper Networks, Inc.
   1194 N. Mathilda Ave.
   Sunnyvale, California  94089
   US

   Email: jhaas@juniper.net

   Robert Raszuk
   Mirantis Inc.
   615 National Ave. #100
   Mountain View, California  94043
   US

   Email: robert@raszuk.net

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