History of BGP
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) was first specified in 1989 by RFC 1105 [1] and remains in use today (though these days we use much newer revised versions of the protocol). However, there were also various predecessor protocols to BGP too.
Timeline of Internet routing protocols
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1982 | The first example of a routing protocol, known as Gateway-to-Gateway Protocol (GGP) was developed. It was very simplistic, selecting routes only based on which was the most direct in terms of having the fewest hops to the destination. |
| 1984 | The development of EGP (Exterior Gateway Protocol). This improved routing decisions by considering distance vectors, instead of just naive hop-based metrics. |
| 1989 | Publication of RFC 1105 which first described the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as we know it. |
| 1990 | The first major revision of BGP is published as RFC 1163, BGP-2. |
| 1991 | BGP-3 is introduced in RFC 1267, along with an analysis of the algorithms employed (RFC 1265). |
| 1994 | BGP-4 is released in RFC 1654; this is the version we use today, albeit with various enhancements added since. |
| 1998 | The Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4 are published as RFC 2283, enabling support for routing other protocols, such as IPv6. |
| 2006 | RFC 4271 is published, further updating BGP-4 to introduce support for route aggregation (to save memory on routers by reducing the size of routing tables, as they grew ever more complex), as well as Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR). |
Footnotes and references
- K. Lougheed, Y. Rekhter, A Border Gateway Protocol, Network Information Center, RFC 1105, June 1989. ↩
- Wikipedia. "Border Gateway Protocol" en.wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol (accessed Dec. 2, 2021) ↩
- Datapath.io on Medium. "The History of Border Gateway Protocol" medium.com. https://medium.com/@datapath_io/the-history-of-border-gateway-protocol-a212b7ee6208 (accessed Dec. 3, 2021) ↩