5. Conclusion

BGP was conceived in 1995 as the external routing protocol for the IPv4 Internet. At that time, the Internet was significantly smaller and less important than it is today. Since then, its use has continued to expand, both in terms of volume (routes and autonomous systems) and functions:

• in terms of volume, as of mid-2010, BGP can typically carry several hundred thousand destinations for a given address family, and up to a million for large BGP/MPLS VPN networks. These figures are still growing today, and the growth in the number of routes on the Internet is not currently expected to slow down;

• In terms of functions, the BGP protocol has now become crucial to the operation of many networks and for a wide range of uses. As a result, numerous BGP extensions have been specified to improve the administration and...