3. Examples

3. Examples

A property such as "NSFNET sponsored/AUP" could be added to all AUP compliant destinations advertised into the NSFNET. NSFNET operators could define a policy that would advertise all routes, tagged or not, to directly connected AUP compliant customers and only tagged routes to commercial or external sites. This would insure that at least one side of a given connection is AUP compliant as a way of enforcing NSF transit policy guidelines.

In this example, we have just eliminated the primary motivation for a complex policy routing database that is used to generate huge prefix and AS path based filter rules. We have also eliminated the delays caused by the out-of-band maintenance of this database (mailing in NACRs, weekly configuration runs, etc.)

A second example comes from experience with aggregation. It is often useful to advertise both an aggregate prefix and the component more-specific prefixes that were used to form the aggregate to optimize "next hop" routing. These component prefixes are only useful to the neighboring BGP peer or perhaps the autonomous system of the neighboring BGP peer, so it is desirable to filter this information. By specifying a community value that the neighboring peer or peers will match and filter on, these more specific routes may be advertised with the assurance that they will not propagate beyond their desired scope.