1998: An Application of the BGP Community Attribute in Multi-home Routing.

This document presents an application of the BGP community attribute [2] in simplifying the implementation and configuration of routing policies in the multi-provider Internet. It shows how the community based configuration can be used to replace the AS-based customization of the BGP "LOCAL_PREF" attribute, a common method used today. Not only does the technique presented simplifies configuration and management at the provider level, it also represents a paradigm shift in that it gives the potential for the customer to control its own routing policy with respect to its service provider, as well as providing the ability for policy configuration to be done at a prefix based granularity rather than the more common AS based granularity.