The case for more versatile BGP Route Reflectors

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standard interdomain routing protocol in the Internet. Inside an Autonomous System (AS), the interdomain routes are often distributed by using BGP Route Reflectors (RR). Today, most RR are simple BGP routers. We show that by adding intelligence to the RR, it is possible to improve both the routing and the packet forwarding in ASes. We show how a versatile RR can help an AS to engineer the flow of its incoming or outgoing interdomain tra#c. We also discuss how a versatile RR could help to reduce the BGP convergence time or reduce the size of the routing tables when providing BGP/MPLS VPN services.