4-Byte AS-PATH

The new AS number is 4-bytes and split into two 2-byte values, in X.Y syntax. The support for the 4-byte AS is advertised via BGP capability negotiation. In order to ensure interoperability with existing BGP peers that do not support 4-byte AS, encoding of BGP OPEN message is reserved and 4-byte AS support is exchanged between the BGP peers via the capability field.



When BGP attempts to establish a session with its peer, the OPEN message may include an optional parameter, called Capabilities. A NEW speaker will include the NEW (4-byte AS) capability when it attempts to OPEN a session with its peer. An OLD speaker should simply ignore the NEW capability advertised by its peer and continue to operate in OLD mode, as detailed in RFC 3392.

If the NEW speaker advertises and receives the 4-byte AS capability from its peer, it will just encode the 4-byte AS number in its AS_PATH or AGGREGATOR attributes when exchanging information with this peer.


If the NEW speaker does not receive the 4-byte AS capability from a particular peer, it indicates this peer is an OLD speaker. Two new attributes are introduced, namely AS4_PATH and AS4_AGGREGATOR. Both attributes are optional transitive. These new attributes use the same encoding as the original ASPATH and AGGREGATOR except the AS Number used is 4-bytes instead of 2-bytes. The NEW speaker will substitute a reserved 2-byte AS number (called AS_TRANS with AS # 23456) for each 4-byte AS so that ASPATH and AGGREGATOR is still 2-byte in length and ASPATH length is still preserved, and at the same time insert the new AS4_PATH and AS4_AGGREGATOR, which will contain the 4-byte encoded copy of the attributes. The NEW speaker will then advertise ASPATH and/or AGGREGATOR together with the AS4_PATH and/or AS4_AGGREGATOR. The OLD speaker that receives these new attributes will preserve and blindly pass them along even though it does not understand them. Subsequent NEW speakers will merge the ASPATH and/or AGGREGATOR with the AS4_PATH and/or AS4_AGGREGATOR to retrieve the original 4-byte AS information without losing any attribute contents, as illustrated in the Figure 1.


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