How the Active Route Is Determined

For each prefix in the routing table, the routing protocol process selects a single best path, called the active route. The algorithm for determining the active route is as follows:

1. Choose the path with the lowest preference value (routing protocol process preference). Routes that are not eligible to be used for forwarding (for example, because they were rejected by routing policy or because a next hop is inaccessible) have a preference of –1 and are never chosen.
2. For BGP, prefer the path with higher local preference. For non-BGP paths, choose the path with the lowest preference2 value.
3. If the path includes an AS path:
   1. Prefer the route with a shorter AS path.

      Confederation sequences are considered to have a path length of 0, and AS and confederation sets are considered to have a path length of 1.

   2. Prefer the route with the lower origin code. Routes learned from an IGP have a lower origin code than those learned from an EGP, and both have lower origin codes than incomplete routes (routes whose origin is unknown).
   3. Depending on whether nondeterministic routing table path selection behavior is configured, there are two possible cases:
      • If nondeterministic routing table path selection behavior is not configured (that is, if the path-selection cisco-nondeterministic statement is not included in the BGP configuration), for paths with the same neighboring AS numbers at the front of the AS path, prefer the path with the lowest multiple exit discriminator (MED) metric. Confederation AS numbers are not considered when deciding what the neighbor AS number is. When you display the routes in the routing table using the show route command, they generally appear in order from most preferred to least preferred. Routes that share the same neighbor AS are grouped together in the command output. Within a group, the best route is listed first and the other routes are marked with the NotBest flag in the State field of the show route detail command.
      • To always compare MEDs whether or not the peer ASs of the compared routes are the same, use the path-selection (always-compare-med) statement. For an example, see Configuring Routing Table Path Selection.

      If nondeterministic routing table path selection behavior is configured (that is, the path-selection cisco-nondeterministic statement is included in the BGP configuration), prefer the path with the lowest MED metric. When you display the routes in the routing table using the show route command, they generally appear in order from most preferred to least preferred and are ordered with the best route first, followed by all other routes in order from newest to oldest.

      In both cases, confederations are not considered when determining neighboring ASs. Also, in both cases, a missing metric is treated as if a MED were present but zero.

4. Prefer strictly internal paths, which include IGP routes and locally generated routes (static, direct, local, and so forth).
5. Prefer strictly external (EBGP) paths over external paths learned through interior sessions (IBGP).
6. For BGP, prefer the path whose next hop is resolved through the IGP route with the lowest metric.
7. For BGP, prefer the path with the largest number of BGP next hops.
8. For BGP, prefer the route with the lowest IP address value for the BGP router ID. For EBGP only, prefer the current active route when a route is received from different neighboring ASs, by default. To disable this default behavior, specify the external-router-id option at the [edit protocols bgp path-selection] hierarchy level. For more information, see Configuring Routing Table Path Selection.
9. For BGP, prefer the route with the shortest route reflection cluster list. Routes without a cluster list are considered to have a cluster list of length 0.
10. Prefer the path that was learned from the neighbor with the lowest peer IP address.

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