Lab 4

Using BGP Communities to

Control Upstream Routing Policy
1. Introduction

BGP communities are optional transitive attributes that can traverse from one autonomous
system to another. While communities do not alter the BGP best path process, upstream service
provider routers can use them to apply specific routing policies (for example, to set the local
preference, filter or blackhole prefixes) within their network.

2. Network Topology
Figure 2: IP addressing scheme

3. Lab Tasks

● To enable signalling by its downstream clients, RREN-01 has published the following
communities.

Community Action

64500:7000 Do NOT advertise to transits

64500:8888 Blackhole

64500:9080 Set local preference 80

64500:9120 Set local preference 120

Table 1: Signaling communities
3.1.1 Part 1: Use communities to signal upstream service classification

● Note that Campus-A-03 subscribes to REN service (RREN, NREN and campuses but no
transit). Refer to table 2 below.

Entity Services subscribed to

Campus-A-01 Transit and REN service (including campuses)

Campus-A-02 Local REN service (REN-A and Campuses only)

Campus-A-03 REN service (RREN and campuses, no transit)

Campus-A-04 REN and transit through RREN-01

Table 2: Services subscription

● Log on to the RREN01 router and implement a policy to prevent prefixes tagged with
64500:7000 from being advertised to the Tier1 ISP.
● Go to PE2 and modify communities set in lab 3 (for Campus-A-03) to include action
community 64500:7000 published by RREN-01.
● Verify that Campus-A-03 prefixes are no longer visible in the Tier1 BGP table.

Stop: Inform your instructor that you have completed part 1.

3.1.2 Part 2: Use communities to control upstream traffic engineering

● In RREN-01,
o match prefixes with community 64500:9080 and apply local-preference 80.
o match prefixes with community 64500:9120 and apply local-preference 120.
● On one of the BGP sessions between NREN-A and RREN-01, mark NREN-A prefixes
with community 64500:9080
● Log on to the RREN-01 router and verify the best path to NREN-A
● Go to NRENA and change the community from 64500:9080 to 64500:9120
● Log on to RREN-01 router and again verify the best path to NREN-A

Stop: Inform your instructor that you have completed part 2

4. Conclusion
We have seen how to influence upstream routing policies using BGP communities. Workshop
participants are encouraged to use the UbuntuNet Alliance virtual routing platform to experiment
with more challenging scenarios.

END