What is the Border Gateway Protocol(BGP)?
BGP Border Gateway Protocol or BGP is an exterior gateway routing protocol or EGP. Exterior Gateway Routing Protocols are routing protocols used to route between autonomous systems. An autonomous system is just a way of saying a set of routers under a single administration. So, BGP is used to route between different autonomous systems, like between service providers as an example. BGP also can be used within an AS, which is referred to as iBGP and has different behavior than eBGP, which is used to route between different AS's. The image below, from vmware docs, shows what we are talking about with eBGP. The clouds represent a single autonomous system and the links between clouds are eBGP links allowing the exchange of routing information between AS's. Autonomous system numbers are how we represent each administrative domain. These numbers were 16-bit decimal numbers ranging from 0 - 65535 until RFC 4893, BGP Support for Four-Octet AS Number Space came out extending it ...