BGP Classful Transport Planes

Abstract

This document specifies a mechanism referred to as "Intent-Driven Service Mapping". The mechanism uses BGP to express Intent-based association of overlay routes with underlay routes having specific Traffic Engineering (TE) characteristics satisfying a certain Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is achieved by defining new constructs to group underlay routes with sufficiently similar TE characteristics into identifiable classes (called "Transport Classes" or "TCs"), that overlay routes use as an ordered set to resolve reachability (Resolution Schemes) towards service endpoints. These constructs can be used, for example, to realize the "IETF Network Slice" defined in the TEAS Network Slices framework (RFC 9543).

Additionally, this document specifies protocol procedures for BGP that enable dissemination of service mapping information in a network that may span multiple cooperating administrative domains. These domains may be administered either by the same provider or by closely coordinating providers. A new BGP address family that leverages the procedures described in RFC 4364 ("BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)") and follows the NLRI encoding described in RFC 8277 ("Using BGP to Bind MPLS Labels to Address Prefixes") is defined to enable each advertised underlay route to be identified by its class. This new address family is called "BGP Classful Transport" (or "BGP CT").

Abstract as published in the RFC, via rfc-editor.org.

What “Experimental” means

Describes a specification that is part of a research or development effort, published so the community can gain experience with it.