One document matched: draft-bonaventure-quoitin-bgp-communities-00.txt







Internet Engineering Task Force                     Olivier Bonaventure
INTERNET DRAFT                                                      UCL
                                                          Bruno Quoitin
                                                                  FUNDP
                                                             June, 2003
                                                 Expires December, 2003

           Common utilizations of the BGP community attribute
             draft-bonaventure-quoitin-bgp-communities-00.txt

Status of this Memo

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Abstract

   Since its introduction in RFC1997, the BGP community attribute has
   been used by many Autonomous Systems to build more scalable routing
   policies. We describe here the most common utilizations of the BGP
   community attribute and provide some examples.


1   Introduction


   The BGP Community attribute is an optional transitive attribute
   introduced in RFC1997 [TCL96] to help scale the management of routes
   within an AS. This attribute consists of a set of four octet values,
   each of which specifies a community value. [TCL96] reserves for
   standard use the community values ranging from 0x0000000 through
   0x0000ffff and 0xffff0000 through 0xffffffff.  Among them, three



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   communities are defined with global significance: NO_EXPORT
   (0xffffff01) which mark routes that should not be advertised outside
   a BGP confederation, NO_ADVERTISE (0xffffff02) which mark routes that
   must not be advertised to other peers, and NO_EXPORT_SUBCONFED
   (0xffffff03) which mark routes that must not be advertised to peers
   outside the boundary of a subconfederation.

   Besides those reserved community values, a lot of room is left for
   experimentation, creativity and so on. [TCL96] proposed nevertheless
   to equally delegate this remaining community space to all the ASes.
   For this purpose, the remaining community values were divided by
   using an AS number in the two high-order octets. Thus, each AS
   received 65536 values of the community space, meaning that for
   instance, ASx is free to use community values ranging from ASx:0 to
   ASx:65535. However, [TCL96] did not specify whether the community
   values corresponding to the private AS space (i.e. community values
   64512:00 - 65534:65535 as defined in [HB96]) could be used in the
   global Internet.

   Since the introduction of the community attribute, it has been used
   for various purposes by ISPs. A recent analysis of the BGP routing
   tables [QUB02] revealed that, depending on the measurement point,
   between 40% and 50% of the routes contained in those tables carried a
   community attribute with up to several dozens of distinct community
   values inside some routes. Despite this widespread utilization of
   community values, there is, to our knowledge, no public document
   describing the main utilizations of this attribute except [CB96], but
   this document only covers a very limited utilization of the community
   attribute.

   In this document, we describe the most common utilizations of the BGP
   community attribute in the global Internet. We base our analysis on
   the information available in the RIPE whois database and on
   discussions with ISPs. This document is organized as follows. First,
   we discuss in section 2 the current utilizations of the BGP community
   attribute and provide several  examples.  We discuss the problem of
   documenting community values in section 3 and some operational issues
   in section 4. Then, in section 5 we discuss the problem of encoding
   those policies in a limited number of community values and provide
   several examples from ISPs.

   We do not discuss in the document the utilization of communities or
   extended communities to support VPN services [RR99] or to block
   denial of service attacks [Tur03].

2  Common utilizations of the BGP Community attribute

   The operation of a BGP router can be summarized as a set of



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   operations performed on each received BGP UPDATE message announcing
   one or several prefixes. First, the received UPDATE messages are
   placed unprocessed in the Adj-RIB-In of the BGP peer from which the
   messages were received.

   A per-peer import policy is applied by the BGP router to determine
   which received messages will be placed in the Loc-RIB.  The
   application of the import policy may result in the modification of
   some attributes of the selected messages (e.g.  addition of local-
   pref). The BGP-decision process is then applied to the content of the
   Loc-RIB to select a best route toward each destination. The BGP
   router will then use a per-peer export policy to determine which
   routes of the Loc-RIB will be placed in the Adj-RIB-Out of each peer.
   The application of the export policy may result in the modification
   of some attributes of the message placed inside the Adj-RIB-Out. A
   more detailed description of the operation of BGP may be found in
   [RLH02].

              +--------+    +---------+
              | Prov1  |    | Prov2   |
              |[London]|    | [Miami] |
              |    RD  |    |   RC    |   +--------+
              +-----\-+    +--//-----+   | Peer2  |
                     \      //           |  RB    |
   +-------+   +------\---//---------+   | //     |
   |       |   |      RW1  RW2        |   +//------+
   |    RA=========RX   ASX          RY===IX  [Brussels]
   |[Oslo] |   |                      |    \
   |Peer1  |   |       RZ1 RZ2        |   +-\-----+
   +-------+   +------//-----\-------+   |   RC   |
                     //       \          |        |
              +-----//-+    +--\-----+   |  Peer3 |
              |   RH   |    |   RI    |   +--------+
              |[Paris] |    |[Tokyo]  |
              | Cust1  |    | Cust2   |
              +--------+    +---------+

                     Figure 1: Reference configuration

   In this document, we utilize the reference environment shown  in
   figure 1 and focus on ASX in the middle of the figure. This AS has
   two upstream providers (Prov1 and Prov2, three peers (Peer1, Peer2
   and Peer3) and two customers (Cust1 and Cust2). Note that the
   examples given in the document may not include all the ASes that
   appear in figure 1.

   To better understand the utilization of the BGP community values, it
   is useful to introduce a small classification that we will use



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   throughout this document. We are conscious that such a classification
   is somewhat approximate because communities were designed as an open-
   ended attribute. This classification nevertheless helps to explain
   today's common practices.

   Although the BGP community values are defined as opaque values, most
   utilizations of those values can be divided in a few subtypes. In the
   remainder of  this document, we will use the word local to indicate
   that a community value was attached by a router belonging to the AS
   to which this community has  been delegated by [TCL96]. We will use
   the word foreign for a community value attached by a router belonging
   to a different AS. For example, in figure 1, community value ASX:123
   would be considered as local if attached by router RX and foreign if
   attached by router RA.

   A second classification of the community values can be defined on the
   basis of how they influence the processing of the BGP UPDATE
   messages. We call informational a community value that only provides
   information and does not directly affect the processing of BGP UPDATE
   messages. Those community values are typically used to aid debugging
   or to provide information to allow remote peers to determine which
   remotely attached communities should be used to influence the
   processing of the BGP UPDATEs by distant BGP routers.

   We call coloring community a community value that is used to color
   the routes sharing a given property. Those colors may influence the
   processing of the BGP UPDATE messages by some routers.  Finally, we
   call signalling community a community value that is used to
   explicitly request a downstream router or AS to perform a given
   action when receiving a BGP UPDATE message with this  community value
   attached.

   In this section, we will refer to the community values by using
   symbolic names and examples.  We discuss the encoding of those
   symbolic community values inside 32 bits wide community values in
   section 5.


 2.1  Informational communities

   Informational communities are usually attached by their owner. Those
   values are used by an AS to indicate the location where the route was
   originated or received from  an external peer. Many ASes have
   documented the utilization of such  communities today. Based on the
   needs of each AS, different types of locations are used in practice :
   geographic location, interconnection point, or autonomous system
   (AS).




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  2.1.1  Geographic location


   Network operators  often want to tag routes with the geographic
   location where they were learned. The types of geographic locations
   used by each AS depend on the size of this AS. A national AS might
   want to tag the city where each route was learned, while an
   international AS would instead tag each route with the country or
   continent where it was learned.

   For example, in our reference configuration, ASX could define several
   community values inside its community space to tag the city and the
   continent where each route was learned. In this case, router RY would
   append community values ASX:Brussels,ASX:Europe to the routes learned
   from Peer2 and Peer3 while router RZ2 would attach community values
   ASX:Tokyo,ASX:Asia.

   This geographical information can be used for several purposes.
   First, it can be useful for debugging purposes.  Second, the
   geographical information can be used by customers or  possibly peers
   to aid in the selection of their best route. For example, consider a
   content provider with servers located in Paris, Tokyo, New-York and
   San Francisco. Based on the informational communities advertised by
   its peers, this content provider could configure its BGP routers in
   Paris to prefer the routes originated in Europe or learned from
   European  peers, while the BGP routers in Tokyo could be configured
   to prefer the routes learned from Asian peers, ....

  2.1.2  Interconnection point


   In some cases, ASes also utilize communities to indicate the
   interconnection  point where each route was learned. Knowing the
   interconnection point where a route was learned can be useful for
   debugging purposes or used by remote peers as discussed above.

   For example, in our reference configuration, ASX could define one
   distinct community value for each IX where it is present.  If ASX
   uses those community values, router RY would append community value
   ASX:IX to the routes learned from Peer2 and Peer3.

   A few ASes also use informational communities to remember the AS from
   which  each route was learned. This utilization of the community
   attribute is  redundant with the AS-Path attribute, but could be
   useful  to simplify the configuration of some routers.


  2.2  Coloring communities



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   A second type of BGP communities are those that are used to color
   routes sharing the same property. Those community values are usually
   local.

   Coloring communities  are typically used by large ISPs to build
   scalable routing policies. In this case, the ISP defines a few types
   of  BGP peers (typically customer, peering partner and transit
   provider) and tags each received route with a community indicating to
   which types of  peers the received route should or should not be
   advertised. This tagging can be used  to ensure that customers
   receive all routes and that peers and providers only receive the
   internal and customer routes.

   For example, in our reference environment, ASX supports three types
   of peers : customers, peers and providers. ASX could want to
   configure its routers to ensure that the routes received from
   customers are advertised to customers, peers and providers while the
   routes learned from providers or peers are only advertised to
   customers. This routing policy  can be achieved by defining three
   community values. ASX:ToCustomers would be used to tag a route that
   needs to be announced to customers, ASX:ToProviders to providers and
   ASX:ToPeers to peers.  In this case, router RX would append
   AS:ToCustomers to the routes learned from Peer1 while router RZ2
   would append ASX:ToCustomers,ASX:ToPeers,ASX:ToProviders to the
   routes learned from Cust2. Router RX would also be configured to only
   advertise the routes with the AS:ToPeers community value on the eBGP
   session with Peer1. Router RZ2 would be configured to only advertise
   the routes with the AS:ToCustomers on the eBGP session with Cust2.

   Coloring communities can also be used  to provide different services
   to different customers. For example, a provider could offer a cheaper
   limited transit  service in which only the customers and the peers of
   this ISP are reachable. In our reference configuration, this can be
   achieved by using two types of local coloring communities. First, the
   routes learned from a customer with a limited transit service would
   be tagged with only the ASX:ToCustomers community value. Second,
   communities would be defined to tag the type of peer from which a
   route has been learned. The export policies of the BGP sessions
   attached to customers with a limited transit service would then be
   configured to only announce the routes learned from customers.

   By using additional community values, it is possible to support
   different types of transit service, for example on a geographical
   basis.

  2.3  Signalling communities

   In addition to the local coloring community values that are widely



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   used by ISPs today, several ISPs have deployed signalling community
   values that can be used by their customers to influence the
   distribution of their routes to remote ASes.  A first type of such
   communities are the ``do not announce'' communities. In this case,
   the community is attached to a route to indicate that this route
   should not be announced to a specified peer, at a specified
   interconnection point or to a given set of peers.

   For example, in our reference environment, ASX could allow its
   customers to indicate which routes should not be announced to each of
   its upstream providers, peers or at the IX. This can be achieved by
   defining several  community values. For example, a route containing
   the ASX:NotProv1  would not be announced to provider Prov1.

   Several tens of ASes have documented their support for this kind of
   community values [QB02].  Many ASes utilize community values to
   indicate that a route should not be announced to a given AS or  at a
   given interconnection point. Some ASes also allow the utilization of
   such communities to indicate that a route should not be announced
   outside a given region or continent.

   To support the utilization of those ``do not announce'' communities,
   an ISP should rely on the appropriate informational communities. For
   example, if an ISP wishes to allow its customers to utilize ``do not
   announce'' communities targeted at a given interconnection point,
   then it would be useful to  also support informational communities
   that allow its customers to determine at which interconnection point
   each route was learned.

   Besides requesting that a route should not be announced to a given
   peer, remotely attached export communities are also often used to
   request the utilization of AS-Path prepending when announcing a route
   to a  specified peer or set of peers. This can also be achieved by
   defining several community values. For example, ASX could configure
   its routers to prepend once (resp.  three times) its own AS number
   when advertising to Prov1  a route containting the ASX:Prepend1Prov1
   (resp.  ASX:Prepend3Prov1) community value.

   Based on the content of the RIPE whois database in October 2001, many
   ISPs rely on remotely attached export communities to allow their
   customers to request the utilization of AS-Path prepending when
   announcing some routes to specified external peers, at specified
   interconnection points or  in specified regions [QB02].

   A final utilization of the signalling communities is to influence the
   BGP decision process by setting the LOCAL_PREF attribute of received
   routes while applying the import policy as documented in [CB96].
   This utilization of the BGP community attribute is still present in



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   the RIPE whois database and [QB02] has found that different  levels
   of preference are provided. For instance: low local preference for
   customer (backup), normal local preference for customer, high local
   preference for customer, reduced peering, normal peering, preferred
   interconnect (private peering), upstream peer and other specific
   preferences.  In our reference configuration, ASX could allow its
   customers to set the value of the preference at 80 or 120 instead of
   its default of 100 inside ASX by using community values
   ASX:Pref80,ASX:Pref120.

 3  Documenting community values

   Autonomous Systems relying on BGP community values to implement
   scalable routing policies will often need to document the chosen
   community values. This documentation can be internal to the AS in the
   case of local community values, but often it needs to be distributed
   to peers and customers.

   Since the RPSL language [AVG^+99] was defined to specify routing
   policies, it would be normal to use it to precisely define the
   utilization of the community values inside an AS. RPSL contains
   several constructs that can be used to define this utilization of the
   community values, but unfortunately, a precise RPSL specification of
   a routing policy with several community values becomes quickly
   difficult to read.

   Due to the difficulty of documenting the utilization of community
   values by using RPSL, many ASes have chosen to provide in their RPSL
   policy, a set of remarks that informally describe the community
   values  supported by this AS. This textual information is often
   sufficient to allow a human operator to determine the meaning of a
   given community value, but unfortunately it cannot be processed by
   tools that build or verify router configurations.

 4  Operational issues

   The BGP Community attribute is a transitive optional attribute.  ASes
   that do not utilize BGP community values in their router's
   configurations usually do not change the content of the BGP community
   attribute of received UPDATE messages.

   An AS willing to utilize informational, coloring or signalling
   community values  should first install filters on its ingress and
   egress BGP routers.  Those filters will depend on the types of
   community values that are used by  the AS.

   If the AS uses informational communities, then its ingress BGP router
   should be configured to remove those community values from the UPDATE



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   messages  received over eBGP sessions. If those communities are only
   used internally and are not documented, then they should also  be
   removed from the UPDATE messages sent to external peers since those
   values do not carry information understandable by the global
   Internet. If those communities are documented and are useful for
   external peers, they may be left in the UPDATE messages sent to
   external peers. In practice, it can be expected that few external
   ASes  will utilize the informational communities defined by other
   ASes. To avoid polluting the BGP routing tables, an AS should only
   send its local informational community values to interested BGP
   peers, typically only to its own customers.

   If the AS uses local coloring community values, then its ingress BGP
   routers should be configured to remove those community values if they
   are found inside UPDATE messages received from external peers.
   Furthermore, since those community values have only a meaning inside
   the AS,  they should be removed from the UPDATE messages sent over
   eBGP sessions to avoid polluting the BGP routing tables of the entire
   Internet.

   If the AS supports signalling community values, then it would
   typically configure its ingress filters to only allow those community
   values over  eBGP sessions with customers and remove such communities
   from UPDATE messages received over eBGP sessions with peers and
   providers. Since those community values have only a local meaning,
   they should be removed from the UPDATE messages sent to any external
   peer.

   Another problem that should be taken into account is the aggregation
   of routes containing BGP community values. In [TCL96] the rule
   proposed to aggregate such routes is to place inside the aggregated
   route all the community values found in the individual routes. This
   rule is applicable for information community values, but using it to
   aggregate routes containing coloring or signalling community values
   could cause problems.  Unfortunately, the encoding of the community
   values does not usually allow a router to determine the type of a
   given community value.

5  Encodings of BGP communities

   A practical issue that occurs when using community values to support
   routing policies as described in the previous section is that each AS
   needs to define the numerical values that it will support. In
   practice, a constraint on this encoding is that each AS has only been
   delegated a space of 65536 distinct community values [TCL96]. In this
   section, we briefly describe several encodings found in the RIPE
   whois database.




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 5.1  Informational communities

   As discussed in section 2.1, the informational communities can be
   used to tag the geographical location, the AS and the IX at which
   each route was learned.

  5.1.1  Geographic location

   Often, an AS that utilizes such community values relies on an
   unstructured list of values and associates a location to each value.
   For example, AS13129 (Global Access Telecommunications, Inc.) defined
   in [RIW02] the values shown in table 2 to tag routes learned in
   specific cities.

       -----------------------
       |13129:3010|Frankfurt |
       -----------------------
       |13129:3020|Munich    |
       -----------------------
       |13129:3030|Hamburg   |
       -----------------------
       |13129:3040|Berlin    |
       -----------------------
       |13129:3050|Dusseldorf|
       -----------------------
       |13129:3210|London    |
       -----------------------
       |13129:3220|Paris     |
       -----------------------
       |13129:3610|New York  |
       -----------------------
             Table 2: Tagging communities published by AS13129

   Some ASes have devised structured encodings of those route tagging
   community values such as the one documented by AS286 (EUnet) shown in
   table 3. With this encoding,  the value used to tag a received route
   is based on the telephone  country code.  These communities are
   documented in [RIW02]. For example, according to this community
   setting, a route with community 286:3032 would have been learned by
   EUnet from a customer located in Belgium.

    -----------------------------------------------------------
    |    286:1000 + countrycode    |Public peer routes        |
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    |    286:2000 + countrycode    |Private peer routes       |
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    |    286:3000 + countrycode    |Customer routes           |
    -----------------------------------------------------------



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    |where countrycode is the E.164 international dial prefix.|
    -----------------------------------------------------------

              Table 3: Tagging communities published by AS286

   Another example is the encoding chosen by AS3561 (Cable & Wireless)
   shown in table 4 that relies on the ISO 3166 codes for countries. The
   resulting communities are documented in [CW02].

   -------------------------------------------------
   |3561:SRCCC|S   is the source (peer or customer)|
   |          |R   is the regional code            |
   |          |CCC is the ISO 3166 country code    |
   -------------------------------------------------
             Table 4: Informational communities used by AS3561

  5.1.2  Informational communities indicating IXes

   Example of such informational communities, documented by AS13129 in
   [RIW02], are shown in table 5. We have not encountered structured
   encodings for the community values used to tag the interconnection
   point where routes were learned.

   -------------------
   |13129:2110|DE-CIX|
   -------------------
   |13129:2120|INXS  |
   -------------------
   |13129:2130|SFINX |
   -------------------
   |13129:2140|LINX  |
   -------------------
             Table 5: Tagging communities published by AS13129

 5.2  Signaling and coloring communities

   In this section, we provide example encodings of signaling and
   coloring  communities based on information found in the RIPE whois
   database [RIW02].

  5.2.1  Coloring communities

   In this case, those community values are only used inside the AS and
   they are usually not documented.

  5.2.2  Signalling communities

   Most of the ASes that support signalling communities rely on a



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   structured list of community values for this purpose. For example,
   table 6 shows some of the community values used by AS1755
   (OpenTransit) and documented in [RIW02].

   ----------------------------------------------------
   |  Value  |Meaning                         |
   ----------------------------------------------------
   |1755:1000|Do not announce to US upstreams/peers   |
   |1755:1101|Do not announce to Sprintlink(US)/AS1239|
   |1755:1102|Do not announce to UUNET(US)/AS701      |
   |1755:1103|Do not announce to Abovenet(US)/AS6461  |
   |   ...   |                                        |
   |1755:2000|No announcement to European peers       |
   |   ...   |                                        |
   ----------------------------------------------------
          Table 6: ``Do not announce'' communities used by AS1755

   However, a few ASes rely on a more structured encoding of the
   community values used for this purpose. For example, AS9057/AS3356
   (Level3) has chosen to reuse a range of community values
   corresponding to the private AS space  as shown in table 7.

   --------------------------------------------------
   |  Value   |Meaning                              |
   --------------------------------------------------
   |65000:XXX |do not announce on peerings to AS XXX|
   | 65001:0  |prepend once to all peers            |
   |65001:XXX |prepend once at peerings to AS XXX   |
   | 65002:0  |prepend twice to all peers           |
   |65002:XXX |prepend twice at peerings to AS XXX  |
   --------------------------------------------------
      Table 7: ``Do not announce'' communities used by AS9057/AS3356

   Similar encodings are used for signalling communities requesting AS-
   Path prepending. For example, AS3561 (Cable & Wireless) has devised
   an interesting set of communities to allow peers to ask not to export
   or ask to prepend. This set can be found in table 8 (the list of
   peers to which these community values are supported may be found  in
   [CW02]).

       ----------------------------------------
       |3561:30PPN|PP is the peer code        |
       |          |N  = 0, do not export      |
       |          |   = 1, prepend once       |
       |          |   = 2, prepend twice      |
       |          |   = 3, prepend three times|
       ----------------------------------------
            Table 8: Signalling communities supported by AS3561



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   Before deploying signalling communities, ISPs should note that the
   IETF is currently developing a new type of extended communities
   [BCH^+03] called ``redistribution communities''. Those redistribution
   communities can be used to influence the export policy of routers.
   Compared to the signalling communities, the redistribution
   communities have two advantages. First, ISPs willing to support them
   do not have to configure complex policies on their routers. This
   simplifies the configuration of routers and reduces the risk of
   misconfiguration. Second, the redistribution communities are non-
   transitive.  This reduces the risk of polluting the BGP routing
   tables.

   Finally, the community values suggested in [CB96] are still used
   today. A typical example of the encoding of those communities is the
   one used by  AS702 (UUNET Europe). This encoding is based on the 2
   community values  shown in table 9.

      -----------------------------------------
      |702:80 |Set Local Pref 80 within AS702 |
      -----------------------------------------
      |702:120|Set Local Pref 120 within AS702|
      -----------------------------------------
             Table 9: Signalling communities defined by AS702

6  Conclusion

   In this document, we have described the main utilizations of the BGP
   community attribute in the global Internet. We have shown that
   several types of community values are used in practice.

   Some community values are purely informational. Community values can
   also be used to color routes sharing the same property.  Other
   community values are used for signalling purposes, for example by
   setting the value of local-pref. We have also provided several
   examples and discussed  configuration guidelines.

   Given the widespread utilization of community values in the global
   Internet, it might be useful to define a few sets of standardized
   community  values to better support the common needs of various ISPs.
   For example, if  a single type of informational community value
   indicating the geographical origin of a route could be defined, then
   it could be used by any BGP router.  Today, each AS defines its own
   type of informational community.

   ISPs willing to support signalling community values could consider
   the utilization of the redistribution communities, a standardized
   type of extended communities being defined by the IETF  [BCH^+03].




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   Another issue is that due to the utilization of community values, it
   becomes cumbersome to precisely specify the routing policies used by
   ISPs with RPSL. Most ISPs only document the community values used as
   remarks in their RPSL policies. This implies that the RPSL policies
   stored in the IRR do not reflect the deployed policies and it thus
   becomes impossible to utilize tools to check the consistency of the
   Internet routing policies.

Acknowledgements

   This work was partially supported by the European Commission within
   the IST ATRIUM  project. We would like to thank RIPE for their whois
   database and the RIPE RIS project. We thank Tim Griffin for his
   comments.

References

   [AVG^+99]  C. Alaettinoglu, C. Villamizar, E. Gerich, D.
     Kessens, D. Meyer, T. Bates,  D. Karrenberg, and M. Terpstra.
     Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL). Internet
     Engineering Task Force, RFC2622, June 1999.

   [BCH^+03]  O. Bonaventure, S. De Cnodder, J. Haas, B. Quoitin,
     and R. White. Controlling the redistribution of BGP routes.
     Internet draft, draft-ietf-grow-bgp-redistribution-00.txt,
     work in  progress, June 2003.

   [CB96]  E. Chen and T. Bates. An Application of the BGP
     Community Attribute in  Multi-home Routing. Internet
     Engineering Task Force, RFC1998, August 1996.

   [CW02]  Communities defined by Cable & Wireless. available from
      http://infopage.cary.cw.net/Routing_Registry/communities.htm
     , January 2002.

   [HB96]  J. Hawkinson and T. Bates. Guidelines for creation,
     selection, and registration of an  Autonomous System (AS).
     Internet Engineering Task Force, RFC1930, March 1996.

   [QB02]  B. Quoitin and O. Bonaventure. A survey of the
     utilization of the BGP community attribute. Technical report
     Infonet-TR-2002-02,  http://www.infonet.fundp.ac.be/doc/tr/,
     March 2002.

   [QUB02]  B. Quoitin, S. Uhlig, and O. Bonaventure. Using
     redistribution communities for interdomain traffic
     engineering. In COST263 Workshop of Quality of future
     Internet Services,  LNCS. Springer-Verlag, October 2002.



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   [RIW02]  Whois database. RIPE NCC,
     http://abcoude.ripe.net/ris/rawdata, January 2002.

   [RLH02]  Y. Rekhter, T. Li, and S. Hares. A Border Gateway
     Protocol 4 (BGP-4). Internet draft,
     draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-18.txt, work in progress, October  2002.

   [RR99]  E. Rosen and Y. Rekhter. BGP/MPLS VPNs. Request for
     Comments 2547, Internet Engineering Task Force, March  1999.

   [TCL96]  P. Traina, R. Chandrasekeran, and T. Li. BGP
     Communities Attribute. Internet Engineering Task Force,
     RFC1997, August 1996.

   [Tur03]  D. Turk. Configuring bgp to block denial-of-service
     attacks. Internet draft, draft-turk-bgp-dos-04.txt, work in
     progress, January  2003.


   Authors' Addresses
   Olivier Bonaventure
   Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium
   URL : http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/OBO/

   Bruno Quoitin
   Infonet group, University of Namur (FUNDP)
   Rue Grandgagnage 21, B-5000 Namur, Belgium
   Email: Bruno.Quoitin@info.fundp.ac.be























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