Congestion control by BGP

Hi,

If we use BGP, can we control the traffic of the lies or can we avoid congestion?. Plese let me know.

[whcdavid]

From my understanding, If you have few routers in your border get another line and then share your traffic between those line. For example if you have T1 or T3 lines you can share the traffic between these lines.

You can do all kinds of things with BGP, include control congestion. First step is to obtain a network administrator who is knowledgeable in this area to assist.

[crnc]

Note: its a manual process. BGP has no concept of link state so you'd have to first identify the conjestion and make the appropriate changes to make the traffic flow over alternative links.

[whcdavid]

Hi James,

Your point is really good. Thank you for sharing with us.

David.K

By congestion I will assume you mean both local congestion and areas of congestion out on the greater internet.

Locally, BGP can be configured to load-balance across multiple paths, as whcdavid said, if you have multiple links it will utilize them evenly as a basic configuration.

When there is congestion between your network and a node that is 3-4 autonomous networks away, as James said, there is no way to automatically adjust to this with BGP alone.

But what you CAN do, is manually, using ping and traceroute, deduce which of your multiple links has a better path to the destination subnet, and you can force your traffic to use that link based on subnet or AS information. If your provider has a robust set of what are called "communities", there are also tricks you can use to force traffic destined back to your network away from those trouble spots that you have identified.

BGP is quite a useful protocol, and if you are going to be in the networking business it is well worth learning.