OSPF Network Design Solutions, Second Edition

OSPF Design Guidelines

The OSPF protocol, as defined in RFC 2328, provides a high-functionality open protocol that enables multivendor networks to communicate using the TCP/IP protocol family. Some benefits of OSPF are as follows:

• Fast convergence

• Variable-length subnet masking (VLSM)

• Authentication

• Hierarchical segmentation

• Route summarization

• Aggregation

All these benefits are needed to handle large and complicated networks.

Whether you are building an OSPF internetwork from the ground up or converting your internetwork to OSPF, the design guidelines highlighted in the sections that follow provide a foundation from which you can construct a reliable, scalable OSPF-based environment.

Different people have different approaches to designing OSPF networks. ...