Chapter 2 Advanced Routing for FortiOS 5.0 : Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) : BGP background and concepts : Background
  
Background
BGP was first used in 1989. The current version, BGP-4, was released in 1995 and is defined in RFC 1771. That RFC has since been replaced by the more recent RFC 4271. The main benefits of BGP-4 are classless inter-domain routing, and aggregate routes. BGP is the only routing protocol to use TCP for a transport protocol. Other routing protocols use UDP.
BGP makes routing decisions based on path, network policies and rulesets instead of the hop-count metric as RIP does, or cost-factor metrics as OSPF does.
BGP-4+ supports IPv6. It was introduced in RFC 2858 and RFC 2545.
BGP is the routing protocol used on the Internet. It was designed to replace the old Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) which had been around since 1982, and was very limited. In doing so, BGP enabled more networks to take part in the Internet backbone to effectively decentralize it and make the Internet more robust, and less dependent on a single ISP or backbone network.