
Configuring IP Services
8-46 117356-A Rev. A
Designing a Route Selection Strategy
A BGP speaker must, at times, evaluate and compare different paths to a
destination network to determine the best path. Because all border routers must
provide the same view of the AS to external ASs, having a selection strategy that
is consistent in the router, and that can be consistent across all border routers, is
very important in BGP. To choose the best available path, BGP uses AS weights
and classes and IP policies.
Assigning AS Weight and Class Values
You can assign a weight class to any AS number and a weight value to a weight
class.
AS weight classes allow you to assign multiple weight values to the same AS.
This feature allows the administrator to consider an AS path differently for
different networks. For example, consider a situation in which two networks --
192.32.1.0 and 192.32.2.0 -- are both reachable by two paths. The first path to
each network shares a common AS -- AS 5. The second path to each network also
shares a common AS -- AS 10. If you want to favor AS 5 in the path to 192.32.1.0
and AS 10 in the path to 192.32.2.0, you can assign one weight class to the AS in
the path to network 192.32.1.0 and another class to the AS in the path to
192.32.2.0.
An assigned weight can range from 1 to 15 plus an infinity value. Weights provide
a way either to prefer or to avoid routes that pass through certain ASs. The weights
of each AS in a path are added, and the path with the smallest total weight is the
preferred path. Any path containing an AS weight of infinity will be avoided.
When a BGP router receives a new route, it evaluates the route against any
existing accept policies. If after this evaluation, the path still is to be used, the
router calculates the total weight of the path.
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