Network designers and implementers try to avoid policy routing, as its common implementation in Cisco IOS requires a complex mix of access-lists and route-maps that have to be deployed on a hop-by-hop basis. In most cases, distance vector routing protocols can be used to implement policy routing requirements in large networks.

In this IP Corner article, Ivan Pepelnjak describes how you can use BGP to implement an architecture where a set of applications should prefer a different subset of links than other applications.