Patent ID: 7236453

Claim:
A method of highly-available Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing in a network, comprising the steps of: establishing BGP peer router connections; exchanging routing information with said BGP peer routers; running BGP protocol on two redundant physically separated control plane master control units, such that one is an active BGP instance and the other is a backup BGP instance by bringing up said active BGP instance before said backup BGP instance; synchronizing the running configuration of said backup BGP instance with the running configuration of said active BGP instance using message transmission from said active instance to said backup instance through a highly reliable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) link; copying routing information from said BGP peer routers onto said backup BGP instance; processing said routing information at said backup BGP instance, such that said backup BGP instance does not advertise said routing information; maintaining dynamic state synchronization of said backup BGP instance with said active BGP instance, such that said active BGP instance enters an ACTIVE-PROTECTED state and said backup BGP instance enters a BACKUP-PROTECT state; and in the event of fail-over of said active BGP instance, then seamlessly recovering without detection of said fail-over by said BGP peer routers in said network, by functionally substituting said BACKUP-PROTECT backup BGP instance for said ACTIVE-PROTECTED active BGP instance, such that said BACKUP-PROTECT backup BGP instance establishes itself as a new active BGP instance.