BGP Link State distribution is achieved by retrieving the Link state and traffic engineering information from OSPF and advertising it through Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) messages with well-defined TLVs and dedicated address families, called Link States.

BGP Link state capability is a means to collect link state information from OSPF protocol and organizing it into Node, Link, and Prefix NLRIs, and then advertising them to a BGP speaker connected to an external application, such as Path Computation Elements (PCE).