The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used today by all Autonomous Systems (AS) in the Internet. Inside each AS, iBGP sessions
distribute the external routes among the routers. In large ASs, relying on a full-mesh of iBGP sessions between routers is
not scalable, so route-reflection is commonly used. The scalability of route-reflection compared to an iBGP full-mesh comes
at the cost of opacity in the choice of best routes by the routers inside the AS. This opacity induces problems like suboptimal
route choices in terms of IGP cost, deflection and forwarding loops. In this work we propose a solution to design iBGP route-reflection
topologies which lead to the same routing as with an iBGP full-mesh and having a minimal number of iBGP sessions. Moreover
we compute a robust topology even if a single node or link failure occurs. We apply our methodology on the network of a tier-1
ISP. Twice as many iBGP sessions are required to ensure robustness to single IGP failure. The number of required iBGP sessions
in our robust topology is however not much larger than in the current iBGP topology used in the tier-1 ISP network.
Keywords BGP - route-reflection - iBGP topology design - optimization