AF-CIX route server Informational BGP Communities

Route Origin

The route server will mark all routes with certain BGP Communities to indicate their origin. You can use this information to determine where a certain route has been injected into the AF-CIX switching platform. This gives you the option to filter routes learned from the route servers based on geographical location. 

Currently we mark the following information:

• Switch: Indicates at which switch a prefix has been injected into the AF-CIX platform. We tag the corresponding edge switch.
  • Example: edge01.los1
• Metro: The metropolitan region corresponding to the switch
  • Example: Lagos
• Country: The country corresponding to the above (in M49 format)
  
  • Example: Nigeria
• Continent: The continent corresponding to the above (in M49 format)
  • Example: Africa

This means that every route you will learn from the route servers will have four (additional) BGP Communities attached which indicate location information.

To avoid ambiguity about the semantics of a certain BGP Community, especially when being present multiple times, we strip all BGP Communities from the range that we use for route origin tagging on import. This is:

• 37793:1911:*
• 37793:1912:*
• 37793:1913:*
• 37793:1914:*

Overview

Example

A prefix has the following BGP Communities attached to it:

• 37793:1914:2
• 37793:1913:556
• 37793:1912:29
• 37793:1911:148

From these BGP Communities you can deduce that this particular prefix has been injected in Africa (37793:1914:2), Nigeria (37793:1913:556) in metro region Lagos (37793:1912:29) at edge01.los1 (37793:1911:148).