Inter-Router Communication
BGP does not use hello packets to discover neighbors like IGP protocols and cannot discover neighbors dynamically. BGP was designed as an interautonomous routing protocol, implying that neighbor adjacencies should not change frequently and are coordinated. BGP neighbors are defined by an IP address.
BGP uses TCP port 179 to communicate with other routers. TCP allows for handling of fragmentation, sequencing, and reliability (acknowledgement and retransmission) of communication packets.
IGP protocols follow the physical topology because the sessions are formed with hellos that cannot cross network boundaries (that is, single hop only). BGP uses TCP, which is capable of crossing network boundaries (that is, multihop capable). While BGP can form neighbor adjacencies that are directly connected, it can also form adjacencies that are multiple hops away. Multihop sessions require that the router use an underlying route installed in the RIB (static or from any routing protocol) to establish the TCP session with the remote endpoint.
In Figure 1-1, R1 is able to establish a direct BGP session with R2. In addition, R2 is able to form a BGP session with R4, even though it passes through R3. R1 and R2 use a directly connected route to locate each other. R2 uses a static route to reach the 10.1.34.0/24 network, and R4 has a static route to reach the 10.1.23.0/24 network. R3 is unaware that R2 and R4 have established a BGP session, even though the packets flow through R3.
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Figure 1-1 BGP Direct and Multihop Sessions
BGP can be thought of as a control plane routing protocol or as an application, because it allows for the exchanging of routes with peers multiple hops away. BGP routers do not have to be in the data plane (path) to exchange prefixes, but all routers in the data path need to know all the routes that will be forwarded through them.