RFC 4274, "BGP-4 Protocol Analysis", January 2006

Errata ID: 3776
Status: Held for Document Update
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: Alfred Hoenes
Date Reported: 2006-07-08
Held for Document Update by: Stewart Bryant
Date Held: 2013-10-30

(4)  inconsistency in updated text

The text of section 6.1 has been revised substantially from its
predecessor, RFC 1774.  Unfortunately, the modifications have
not been performed incompletely, leading to near-nonsense text.
Section 6.1, on page 7, says:

   Immediately after the initial BGP connection setup, BGP peers
   exchange complete sets of routing information.  If we denote the
   total number of routes in the Internet as N, the total path
   attributes (for all N routes) received from a peer as A, and assume
   that the networks are uniformly distributed among the autonomous
   systems, then the worst-case amount of bandwidth consumed during the
|  initial exchange between a pair of BGP speakers (P) is

|          BW = O((N + A) * P)
                         ^^^^                     ^^^^^

This makes no sense -- obviously you can't multiply by a non-numeric
quantity P, "a pair of BGP speakers".

I strongly suspect that it was the intention to say:

   Immediately after the initial BGP connection setup, BGP peers
   exchange complete sets of routing information.  If we denote the
   total number of routes in the Internet as N, the total path
   attributes (for all N routes) received from a peer as A, and assume
   that the networks are uniformly distributed among the autonomous
   systems, then the worst-case amount of bandwidth consumed during the
|  initial exchange between a pair of BGP speakers is

|          BW = O((N + A))

Please verify.

Notes:

from errata 148

This has no impact on interoperability. It should be looked at on any update of the RFC.

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