BGP Peers, BGP Sessions, BGP Messages

Table of Contents
 What is BGP peer?
 BGP Session Establishment and Session States

What is BGP peer?

To use BGP, the neighbourship between the BGP routers must
be established. You can use the statement BGP neighbour or BGP
peer for this establishment.
There are two types of BGP peer. These are iBGP(interior BGP)
peer and eBGP(exterior BGP) peer. iBGP peer is the neighbour within the
same AS. eBGP peer is the neighbour within another AS.

 
BGP, IBGP (Internal BGP) and EBGP (External BGP)
In the topology above, these peering types are showned. As an example,
here, router A and router B are iBGP peers. Because they are in the same AS.
But router A and Router X are eBGP peers, because they are member of
different ASs.

BGP Session Establishment and Session

States
Without any connection attemp, the session is firstly in the idle state. With
the first TCP message, the state changes to connect.

 
BGP Session Establishment
For BGP, firstly TCP connection must be established. This is called three-way
handshake. This messages are SYN,SYN-ACK and ACK as you know.
After TCP connection, one peer send Open Message and the other peer
respond with another Open Message. During this process the state
become OpenSent .

BGP Protocol
AS you know there are two types of routing protocols in general. These
are IGP(Interor Gateway Protocols) and EGP(Exterior Gateway
Protocols). In the previous posts we have talked about some
of IGP protocols. In this post, we will talk on EGP.
EGP is the abbreviation of Exterior Gateway Protocol. In the first place
there was only one protocol, EGP, as an EGP(again). But after years it retired
and now BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the only EGP.
IGPs give us the ability to route the traffic within an Autonomous System.
But EGP allow us to route between AS(Autonomous System)s. Because
of the fact that BGP(Border Gataway Protocol) is the only EGP protocol,
BGP makes routing between ASs. BGP is also known as Internet Protocol.
Think about it, internet is the collection of connected ASs.

You can test your BGP Knowledge on BGP Practice Tests Page!

There are many corporates like Cisco, Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent on internet
and they have their own AS numbers. And internet is collection of these
Autonomous Systems.

 
BGP Autonomous Systems on the World, This is Internet
(much more points than this green points)
What is Autonomous System(AS) and AS
Number(ASN)?
An autonomous system(AS) is a network or a collection of networks that are
under a single entity or organization management. And the internet is the
collection of ASs.
ASs has their own numbers for identification, ASNs. Every router used in BGP,
can belong to only one AS.
As we say above, with BGP we route the traffic between ASs. Every AS has an
AS Number between 1 and 65535, whose 64512 – 65535 range is
reserved for private use. Here, you can think the private range, like private
IP blocks, they are not on internet. But the rest of the numbers are belogns to
specific ASs. These ASs are different vendors’, ISPs’, etc… (You can check the
AS numbers for various companies, like Cisco).
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the corporate who
assigns AS Numbers(ASNs) to the Regional Internet Registries
(RIRs) like RIPE, APNIC, etc.. all over the world. And they assigns this
numbers to the AS owners.
You can check the assigned ASNs in the following link:IANA, Assigned AS
Numbers
You can check the ASNs with the company which they are assigned
in the following link:Assigned AS Numbers and Companies