RFC 9871: BGP Color-Aware Routing (CAR)
Recent RFCs 2025-11-20
Summary:
This document describes a BGP-based routing solution to establish
end-to-end intent-aware paths across a multi-domain transport
network. The transport network can span multiple service provider and
customer network domains. The BGP intent-aware paths can be used to
steer traffic flows for service routes that need a specific intent.
This solution is called BGP Color-Aware Routing (BGP CAR).
This document describes the routing framework and BGP extensions to
enable intent-aware routing using the BGP CAR solution. The solution
defines two new BGP SAFIs (BGP CAR SAFI and BGP VPN CAR SAFI) for
IPv4 and IPv6. It also defines an extensible Network Layer
Reachability Information (NLRI) model for both SAFIs that allows
multiple NLRI types to be defined for different use cases. Each type
of NLRI contains key and TLV-based non-key fields for efficient
encoding of different per-prefix information. This specification
defines two NLRI types: Color-Aware Route NLRI and IP Prefix NLRI. It
defines non-key TLV types for the MPLS label stack, SR-MPLS label
index, and Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) Segment Identifiers
(SIDs). This solution also defines a new Local Color Mapping (LCM)
Extended Community.