Using anycast as an abstract next hop (ANH) to reduce information related to border gateway protocol (BGP) next hops received by autonomous system border routers (ASBRs) and/or to improve BGP path convergence

Abstract

An autonomous system border router (ASBR) provided in a domain in which routers share an anycast address, may perform a method comprising: (a) receiving, from an exterior Border Gateway Protocol (eBGP) peer, first reachability information for a first prefix, the first reachability information including a first next hop (NH) address; (b) communicating first link state information about the first prefix to another router in the domain, the first link state information associating the first prefix with the anycast address; (c) receiving, from an eBGP peer, second reachability information for a second prefix, the second reachability information including a second next hop (NH) address; and (d) communicating second link state information about the second prefix to the other router in the domain, the second link state information associating the second prefix with the anycast address. This effectively reduces the number of next hops related to a prefix learned by two or more ASBRs (e.g., one or more spine routers in a Clos of an aggregate spine) via eBGP, stored as forwarding information on a non-ASBR in an IGP domain (e.g., on a leaf node in a Clos of an aggregate spine).

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.