iBGP: Full mesh requirement

When implementing iBGP in your AS you are required to create a full mesh topology - that is - all routers need to be logically connected to every other device in the AS via a neighbor peer relationship - hence requiring you setup individual peering sessions between them all.

The reasoning behind this while eBGP (or when routing between AS's) uses the AS_PATH field to avoid loops - by rejecting an advertised route if the AS_PATH contains it's own AS number, iBGP does not modify this field and hence can't detect loops. For example:

Lets say we have three routers A, B and C - all within a single AS and a eBGP router. The eBGP router then advertises a prefix to router A, which in turn installs it and then advertises it to router B, installs it and then advertises it to router C, installs it and then advertises it to router A - now if router A accepts the route it will cause a loop - now since the AS_PATH is not modified Router A is unsure whether it is a new route advertisement or it is simply an advertisement that has already traversed the router and is being sent back.

Although as your network become larger this can present serious scalability issues - so to combat this we can utilize either route reflectors or confederations.

Route Reflectors: Allow you to avoid having to have a full mesh topology between all of your BGP speakers, instead a cluster is formed where the BGP speakers form a session with the route reflector node - which in turn learns all routes and then advertises them to the BGP speakers. This does however introduce a single point of failure - so utilizing multiple RR's is generally good practice.

Confederations: A confederation is simply another internal AS that is used to split up the existing internal AS - that in turn then hooks up to the eBGP AS.

Typically is it good practise to establish the iBGP sesion using a loopback interface since the interface will remain up dispite any physical faults with a port going down..

Sources:

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos13.3/topics/concept/bgp-ibgp-understanding.html