Open Shortest Path First Protocol

OSPF is very different from RIP. A router running RIP sends information about the entire
network to its neighbors. A router running OSPF floods information about its neighbors to the
entire network.
Flooding means that the router sends the update out of every network port, and every router
that receives the update also sends it out of every port except the one it receives it on.
Flooding rapidly disseminates routing information to the entire network.
OSPF is called a linkstate protocol because it creates a graph of the state of all of the links
in the network. Every OSPF router creates its graph using the information about all of the
routers and their neighbors that flooding distributes throughout the network. Each graph is
unique because every router creates the graph with itself as the root of the tree. The graph is
built using the Dijkstra
Shortest Path First algorithm, hence the name of the protocol. The algorithm builds the graph
in this manner:
1. The system starts by installing itself as the root of the graph with a cost of 0.
The system installs the neighbors of the system that was just added to the graph. The cost
of reaching those neighbors is calculated as the cost of reaching the system just installed
plus the cost that system advertises for reaching the neighbors.
2. The system selects the lowestcost path for each destination. It repeats steps 2 and 3 for
every system for which it has information.
3. Clearly, building a linkstate graph for a large network every time a route changes creates
a lot of overhead for the router. For this reason, OSPF divides the routing domain up into
smaller, more manageable pieces. The entire routing domain is called an autonomous
system, and the pieces are
called areas. A special area, called the backbone area, is defined to interconnect all of the
areas in the autonomous system. Routers within an area only have knowledge of their area
and therefore only create a graph of the systems in that area.
OSPF is a much more complex system than RIP, but OSPF is better suited for large
networks.
However, OSPF is not always needed for an enterprise network, and may not be needed by
a small