CDN Featured Article

As the de facto and perhaps most basic routing protocol of the Internet, Border Gateway (News - Alert) Protocol (BGP) has been in existence since 1989. Based on the network connectivity of multiple but autonomous systems, BGP uses paths, network policies and rules defined by network administrators to make core Internet routing decisions.

The Internet has undergone a few changes since 1989, but BGPv4, which is widely used today, has remained unchanged since 1994. Designed to handle the relatively small scale Internet and networks of the 90s, BGP is somewhat of a relic in today’s cloud-based, services-driven Internet of Things. A recent article from network performance experts Teridion takes a look at BGP’s role in today’s changing Internet landscape.

Approximately two million computers were connected globally in the 1990s, when the version of BGP used today came into existence. Home connectivity was still largely relegated to hobbyists and the majority of people on the Internet were scientists, scholars and government users. Today there are approximately four billion Internet users globally and more than 13 billion devices are connected thanks to the IoT. The sheer volume of users, devices and traffic presents amazing complexities that were simply not a factor when BGP was conceived.

Internet content has changed dramatically as well. In the 1990s, most web sites were text based and relatively simple. Today’s web content encompasses real-time video, gaming and collaboration applications and services requiring low levels of latency and high availability. BGP was simply not architected to handle this type of connectivity and that presents a number of challenges.

BGP was designed to reliably connect point A to point B, but not to do it quickly or efficiently. Because it doesn’t take speed or performance into consideration, it can significantly slow down traffic and degrade performance. It is also a complex protocol that can be difficult to manage, analyze and troubleshoot, with the potential to cause outages, compromise security and create unpredictable errors.

Thankfully, service providers and network administrators are working on ways to improve BGP through integrated intelligence and performance metrics and analytics. For instance, Teridion’s next-gen approach to content delivery networks (CDNs) offers a layer of intelligence to deduce whether applications are latency sensitive or require more bandwidth. Packets may then be sent over the best routes to meet their specific needs, automatically and intelligently. By using today’s embedded intelligence and optimization tools to make routing decisions, BGP can live harmoniously within today’s wildly evolving Internet landscape.