Patent ID: 8265058

Claim:
A method for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route selection in a router in a BGP network, comprising: receiving a first route entry and a second route entry, wherein the first route entry is received from a BGP peer router and is stored in a BGP table maintained by a BGP module within the router, and wherein the second route entry is received from a routing protocol different than BGP; downloading the first route entry from the BGP module to a route information base (RIB); and downloading the second route entry from the routing protocol different than BGP to the RIB; processing logic assigning a first administrative distance to the first route entry and processing logic assigning a second administrative distance to the second route entry; redistributing the second route entry including the second administrative distance from the RIB of the router to the BGP table; selecting, at the BGP module, one of the first and the second route entries to download to the RIB based on their respective administrative distances, wherein selecting the one of the first and second route entries based on their respective administrative distances includes: comparing the administrative distances of the first and second route entries, and selecting the route entry with a more preferred administrative distances based on a predetermined criterion out of the first and the second route entries; and the BGP module downloading the selected entry to the RIB.