Looking Ahead

The Border Gateway Protocol has defined the basis of routing architectures in the Internet. The segregation of networks into autonomous systems has logically defined the administrative and political borders between organizations. Interior Gateway Protocols can now run independently of each other, but networks can still interconnect via BGP to provide global routing.

Chapter 5, "Border Gateway Protocol Version 4," is an overview of how BGP-4 operates, including detailed discussions of its message header formats.