BGP Policies (Part 5)
At the most basic level, there are only three BGP policies: pushing traffic through a specific exit point; pulling traffic through a specific entry point; preventing a remote AS (more than one AS hop away) from transiting your AS to reach a specific destination. In this series I’m going to discuss different reasons for these kinds of policies, and different ways to implement them in interdomain BGP.
In this post I’m going to cover AS Path Prepending from the perspective of AS65001 in the following network—
Since the length of the AS Path plays a role in choosing which path to use when forwarding traffic towards a given reachable destination, many (if not most) operators prepend the AS Path when advertising routes to a peer. Thus an AS Path of [65001], when advertised towards AS65003, can become [65001,65001] by adding one prepend, [65001,65001,65001] by adding two prepends, etc. Most BGP implementations allow an operator to prepend as many times as they would like, so it is possible to see twenty, thirty, or even higher numbers of prepends.
Note: The usefulness of prepending is generally restricted to around two or three, as the average length of an AS Path in the global Internet is around 4 hops.
If AS65001 would like traffic destined to 100::/64 to enter from AS65003 rather than AS65002, it can prepend the AS Path at every peering point with AS65002 (A and B) with two hops (sending [65001,65001,65001] to AS65002). If preference, MED, and all other metrics are equal, AS65002 would then prefer the path with the shorter AS Path through AS65003, rather than the path directly into AS65001 (either through A or B).
That all metrics are equal is not likely, however. AS65002 will probably have preference set so routes learned directly from customers (such as AS65001) are selected over routes learned from peers (such as AS65003). The impact of prepending on route selection by directly connected peers is, therefore, uncertain.
Moving one step out in the network, consider the routes received by AS65004 to reach 100::/64. There will be one route along [65002,65001,65001,65001], and another with an AS Path of [65003,65001]. All other things being equal (same preference, etc.), AS65004 will choose to send traffic destined to 100::/64 through AS65003 rather than AS65002. How likely is it all the other BGP metrics will be equal at AS65004? So long as the peering between AS65004, AS65003, and AS65002 are all of the same type, the odds are high—so prepending can help move some (not all) traffic from one inbound link to another.
Because AS Path prepending has variable results over time, operators using this technique often “just try it” to see what the effect will be. There’s no real way to predict how effective prepending any number of times will be in moving traffic from one inbound link to another.
What if AS65001 does not want traffic destined to 100::/64 to traverse AS6505? For instance, suppose AS6506 s on across an ocean, mountain range, or other difficult-to-cross geographic feature. AS65005 crosses this geography via a satellite link, while AS65004 crosses the same geography via an optical cable. Sine optical cable runs can provide better delay and jitter than a satellite link, AS65001 may desire to choose which of these two autonomous systems is traversed to reach 100::/64.
This cannot be directly accomplished using AS Path prepend, as both AS65004 and AS65005 will both receive the same prepended path.
To express this kind of policy, some operators allow their customers to set communities that cause the operator to remotely prepend a given route advertisement. For instance, NTT allows their customers to set a community that will cause NTT to prepend specific routes when those routes are advertised to specific autonomous systems—in this case, AS65001 could add the community 65421:65005 to the advertisement for 100::/64, which would cause NTT to prepend AS65001 when advertising 100::64 to AS65005, and not prepend anything when advertising 100::/64 to AS65004.
This technique is subject to the same caveats as using AS Path prepend locally—it may work in some situations, or it may not—because the local operator does not have visibility into the policies of the operators they are trying to influence.