Operation Manual – MBGP
H3C S9500 Series Routing Switches
Chapter 1 MBGP Multicast Extension
Configuration
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Chapter 1 MBGP Multicast Extension
Configuration
When configuring MBGP, go to these sections for information you are interested in:
z MBGP Multicast Extension Overview
z MBGP Multicast Extension Configuration
z Displaying and Maintaining MBGP Configuration
z MBGP Multicast Extension Configuration Example
1.1 MBGP Multicast Extension Overview
At present, the most widely used inter-domain unicast routing protocol is BGP-4.
Because the multicast topology may be different from the unicast topology, BGP-4 must
be modified in order to implement the transmission of inter-domain multicast routing
information. Some routers in the network may only support unicast rather than
multicast and may not forward multicast packets since the particular policy requires that.
To construct inter-domain multicast routing trees, you need to know the unicast routing
information as well as the information of multicast-supporting parts of the network,
namely, the multicast network topology.
BGP-4 has been proved to be an effective and stable inter-domain unicast routing
protocol. Therefore, it is more rational to enhance and extend the BGP-4 protocol than
to construct a new protocol. RFC2858 defines an extended BGP-4, Multi-Protocol BGP
(MP-BGP), to provide routing information in use for multiple routing applications. MBGP
can not only carry IPv4 unicast routing information but also the routing information of
other network layer protocols (such as multicast, IPv6). Carrying multicast routing
information is only one of the extended functions.
MBGP enables unicast and multicast routing information to be exchanged through the
same process but stored in different routing tables. As MBGP is an enhanced version of
BGP-4, all the common policies and configuration methods that BGP-4 supports can be
applied to multicast.
This chapter describes mainly MBGP extension for multicast.
1.1.1 MBGP Extension Attributes for Multicast
To make MBGP support multicast, RFC2858 defines two new route attributes in the
UPDATE message: MP_REACH_NLRI (multiprotocol reachable NLRI) and
MP_UNREACH_NLRI (multiprotocol unreachable NLRI). They are all optional
non-transitive attributes, that is, routers that do not support MBGP can ignore the
attributes and do not forward the attributes.