New routing protocol to replace BGP is one of the most common questions every good Network Engineer in their career at least a few times encounter. In this post, we will look at some of those thoughts and we will discuss aims to replace BGP were real or not.
LISP as a new routing protocol aims to replace BGP?
Locator and Identity Separation Protocol, RFC 6830, as an experimental RFC, was one of those technologies, many Network Engineers thought of as a replacement for BGP, especially over the Internet. This was probably one of the biggest myths we have been discussing for years when we discuss Routing protocol to replace BGP, but first thing is, LSIP is not a Routing protocol!. It is an IP in the IP Encapsulation mechanism, or in other words, a tunneling mechanism, which is mainly used to hide the Internal prefixes from the network core to avoid the control plane state.So, LISP helps for Routing protocol scalability but LISP was never aimed to replace BGP. In fact, I discussed exactly this point in the below video with Dino Farinacci, who is the inventor of the LISP protocol. Dino runs, www.lispers.net, a very cool LISP website, I would recommend you to visit. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al3ykkkltbY&t=1581s[/embed] Replacing BGP with another protocol was not discussed only for LISP of course.
Can Blockchain replace BGP on Internet?
This was another discussion, for some time people discussed or wondered let;'s say. And the short answer is Blockchain cannot replace and it was not meant to replace BGP, by any means, including for the Global Internet. Blockchain validates the transaction between the parties, as a distributed architecture. But the computational requirement of Blockchain is too high and the BGP's computational requirement has to be very low as there is so many updates that need to be sent in a short amount of time.I discussed this point with Jeff Tantsura, a long-time IETF fellow, who wrote over 50 RFCs on many topics in Routing, MPLS, and many areas in IETF in the below video. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgXqS1Tqz3Q&t=11s[/embed]
Can OSPF replace BGP?
This one we see sometimes in the discussions as well and let's explain why it cannot. BGP is a scalable protocol, that was invented to run on a global scale. So, BGP runs the entire Internet, and currently, BGP carries almost a million IPv4 unicast prefixes on the Global Internet. As an Interior Gateway Routing protocol. OSPF was never meant to carry this amount of prefixes. BGP from day one supports the excellent policy. Inbound and Outbound direct path manipulation is possible with many techniques with BGP. With OSPF, only bandwidth as a cost, in the outbound direction can be used to influence the path, so can't give us any flexibility in terms of policy support.Scalability, policy support, multi-protocol support, and many other criteria, make BGP an External, Global scale, distributed, routing protocol, and OSPF or any other IGP routing protocols, cannot replace it for the Global Internet. Every now and then new routing aims to replace BGP discussion can appear, please refer to this post, and if you hear any other protocol discussion for a replacement for BGP, let us know through our social media accounts.