OSPF Design Considerations
Introduction
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a link state protocol that has been around for a long time. It is geneally well understood, but design considerations often focus on the maximum number of routers in an area. What other design considerations are important for OSPF? What can we do to build a scalable network with OSPF as the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP)?
Prefix Suppression
The main goal of any IGP is to be stable, converge quickly and to provide loop free connectivity. OSPF is a link state protocol and all routers within an area maintain an identical Link State Data Base (LSDB). How the LSDB is built it out of scope for this post but one relevant factor is that OSPF by default advertises stub links for all the OSPF enabled interfaces. This means that every router running OSPF installs these transit links into the routing table. In most networks these routes are not needed, only connectivity between loopbacks is needed because peering is setup between the loopbacks. What is the drawback of this default behavior?
- Larger LSDB
- SPF run time increased
- Growth of the routing table
To change this behavior, there is a feature called prefix suppression. When Continue reading