BGP Community is a widely-used BGP attribute to control prefixes. To control prefixes in each AS, the format is generally like "*:<AS-name>" with a limited 4 octet packet length. That limited packet length causes an issue when we accommodate a 4 byte AS number to the current format. In the past, there were several activities to resolve the issue in the Internet community like IETF. Those however didn't end in great success.
Large BGP Community, which is another BGP community format newly introduced at IETF, aims for very simple architecture with 12 octet octet length. There're already on-going activities to support Large BGP Community in several vendors. To make the architecture greatly fit to our real operation world, it's obviously important to have a discussion among actual operators and vendors. Deploying the community into commercial networks and see how it goes would be also important.
In this session, I'd like to talk about a technical overview of Large BGP Community with some background of the deployment, then discuss with attendees if the community would be useful for our actual network operations.
Presenter:
Yoshinobu Matsuzaki (Internet Initiative Japan Inc.)
