On the use of BGP communities for fine-grained inbound traffic engineering

TL;DR

This paper explores using BGP communities to enable finer-grained inbound traffic engineering by manipulating perceived AS-paths, addressing a complex problem in inter-domain traffic management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach leveraging BGP communities for more precise inbound traffic control, complementing existing methods.

Findings

BGP communities can be used to influence inbound traffic at a finer granularity.

The technique effectively manipulates incoming traffic by customizing perceived AS-paths.

Constraints and limitations of the approach are analyzed.

Abstract

In the context of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), inbound inter-domain traffic engineering (TE) remains a difficult problem without panacea. Each of previously investigated method solves a part of the problem. In this study, we try to complement the map by exploring the use of BGP communities. With BGP community based polices enabled in transit provider networks, we are able to manipulate incoming traffic for stub Autonomous System (AS) in a finer granularity than known techniques by customizing the AS-paths perceived by remote networks. We analyze the constraints using this technique, along with its effectiveness and granularity.