BORDER GATEWAY PROTOCOL NETWORK LAYER REACHABILITY INFORMATION NON-KEY DATA EXCHANGE

Techniques are described herein for encoding non-key data along with each Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) packed in a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Update message. This may be useful to increase the NLRI packing efficiency of the Update message when the NLRIs have unique path information associated therewith, or when only a subset of NLRIs have some path information associated therewith. A number of use cases may be employed to take advantage of this mechanism