Chapter 5. Flooding

When outlining the chapters and chapter sequence for this book, I encountered a dilemma: Should flooding or link state synchronization be covered first? Flooding happens whenever a link state router first starts up and forms an adjacency, as does database synchronization. But flooding also happens as an ongoing mechanism in a steady-state network to maintain the database. So does synchronization. I argued with myself over this for some time (which is one of many bits of evidence my wife cites for why I should be in a secure institution someplace).

My conclusion is that flooding can happen without synchronization, but synchronization cannot happen without flooding, so this chapter discusses flooding, and the following chapter ...

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