Multiprotocol BGP is the supported Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) for IPv6. Multiprotocol BGP extensions for IPv6 supports the same features and functionality as IPv4 BGP. IPv6 enhancements to multiprotocol BGP include support for an IPv6 address family and network layer reachability information (NLRI) and next hop (the next router in the path to the destination) attributes that use IPv6 addresses.

BGP uses a router ID to identify BGP-speaking peers. The BGP router ID is 32-bit value that is often represented by an IPv4 address. By default, the Cisco IOS software sets the router ID to the IPv4 address of a loopback interface on the router. If no loopback interface is configured on the router, then the software chooses the highest IPv4 address configured to a physical interface on the router to represent the BGP router ID. When configuring BGP on a router that is enabled only for IPv6 (the router does not have an IPv4 address), you must manually configure the BGP router ID for the router. The BGP router ID, which is represented as a 32-bit value using an IPv4 address syntax, must be unique to the BGP peers of the router.