Is it possible to implement load balancing using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)?

Can开发者_Go百科 I implement load balancing in BGP?

Not exactly yes, not exactly no

BGP was not intended for traffic engineering but it can certainly be used for that purpose within some limits.

In the traditional multi-homed-to-different providers case, one typically announces all routes to both. Measures the resulting traffic. By prepending your own ASN to the busier path you can tune the metric that remote AS's use to choose one received route over the other. This doesn't always work because of remote route filtering but it should give you some control.

There are other ways. It's hard to appropriately treat this subject in a SO answer but there are a couple of well-known many-times-reviewed books on BGP and this is the first question they all answer.

Yes. However, the full nuances of how to do this depend greatly on the particular circumstances, and would prevent anybody from giving an accurate answer about your specific case without more details.

See:

• Load Balancing in BGP Networks
• How Does Load Balancing Work?
• Load Sharing with BGP in Single and Multihomed Environments

for more information.

If you're using Cisco IOS, there's BGP Multipath if you have multiple nodes peering:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_2t/12_2t11/feature/guide/ft11bmpl.html

Yes load balancing is possible in BGP, there are many way. Here is a good post about eBGP load balancing with single-homed BGP environment & two ISP connected through Static route.