OSPF Complete Implementation

8. Neighbor Maintenance

In this chapter, we discuss the handling of neighbor relationships by the OSPF implementation: their discovery, the initial database synchronization performed after discovery, and the continued monitoring of neighbor liveness. This subject naturally encompasses both the OSPF neighbor and the interface finite state machines.

A number of small enhancements have been made to OSPF’s Hello Protocol, to speed up neighbor discovery and to minimize its bandwidth consumption. These are discussed in Section 8.2.

The ospfd software also contains enhancements reducing resource consumption during initial database synchronization, the so-called Database Exchange process. These enhancements include limiting the number of concurrent Database ...