5. Operations

By default, if a particular BGP session is running over IPvx (where IPvx is IPv4 or IPv6) and if the BGP speaker sending an update is putting its own address in as the next hop, then the next-hop address SHOULD be specified as an IPvx address, using the encoding rules specified in the AFI/SAFI definition of the NLRI being updated. This default behavior may be overridden by policy.

When a next-hop address needs to be passed along unchanged (e.g., as a Route Reflector (RR) would do), its encoding MUST NOT be changed. If a particular RR client cannot handle that encoding (as determined by the BGP Capability Advertisement), then the NLRI in question cannot be distributed to that client. For sound routing in certain scenarios, this will require that all the RR clients be able to handle whatever encodings any of them may generate.