Improving BGP Protocol to Advertise Multiple Routes for the Same Destination Prefix

An Internet autonomous system (AS) uses BGP policies in order to meet its local objectives (e.g. optimal routing within AS) and peering contracts with neighboring ASes (e.g. advertising some specific routes to a neighbor, forwarding traffic over specific paths, etc.) In this paper we propose an enhancement of BGP route selection and advertisement processes, and demonstrate how the enhanced BGP can be used to flexibly implement diverse policies, regardless of the network topology, that were not feasible before.