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        RFC 1998:

        Title:      An Application of the BGP Community Attribute
                    in Multi-home Routing
        Author:     E. Chen & T. Bates
        Date:       August 1996
        Mailbox:    enke@mci.net, tbates@cisco.com
        Pages:      9
        Characters: 16,953
        Updates/Obsoletes: none

        URL:        ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1998.txt


This document presents an application of the BGP community attribute
in simplifying the implementation and configuration of routing
policies in the multi-provider Internet. It shows how the community
based configuration can be used to replace the AS-based customization
of the BGP "LOCAL_PREF" attribute, a common method used today.  Not
only does the technique presented simplifies configuration and
management at the provider level, it also represents a paradigm shift
in that it gives the potential for the customer to control its own
routing policy with respect to its service provider, as well as
providing the ability for policy configuration to be done at a prefix
based granularity rather than the more common AS based granularity.
This RFC is the product of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group of
the IETF.

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Joyce K. Reynolds
USC/Information Sciences Institute