5. Conclusion

The functional richness of the BGP-IV protocol more than justifies its massive deployment on the Internet. The most recent specification efforts should consolidate this popularity, especially as BGP-IV can now carry routing information other than that characteristic of the IPv4 protocol in unicast transmission mode.

In particular, in view of the many discussions currently taking place within the Internet community to deploy IP networks with differentiated qualities of service, the BGP-IV protocol appears to be one of the cornerstones of what is known as quality-of-service routing [RFC-2386][RFC-2676] , insofar as it already makes it possible to prioritize the use of certain paths to reach specific destinations, in accordance with a routing policy set...