
Customizing OSPF Services
114065 Rev. A 5-3
OSPF Concepts and Terminology
OSPF is a link-state protocol. A router running a link-state protocol periodically
tests the status of the physical connection to each of its neighbor routers and sends
this information to its other neighbors. A link-state protocol does not require each
router to send its entire routing table to its neighbors. Instead, each OSPF router
floods only link-state change information throughout the autonomous system (or
area, if the AS is divided into areas). This process is referred to as the
synchronization of the routers’ topological databases.
With the link information, each router builds a shortest-path tree with itself as the
root of the tree. It then can identify the shortest path from itself to each destination
and build its routing table.
OSPF Addresses and Variable-Length Masks
A destination in as OSPF route advertisement is expressed as an IP address and a
variable-length mask. Taken together, the address and the mask indicate the range
of destinations to which the advertisement applies.
The ability to specify a range of networks allows OSPF to send one summary
advertisement that represents multiple destinations. For example, a summary
advertisement for the destination 128.185.0.0 with a mask of 0xffff0000 describes
a single route to destinations 128.185.0.0 to 128.185.255.255.
OSPF Neighbors
OSPF neighbors are any two routers that have an interface to the same network. In
each OSPF network, routers use the Hello protocol to discover their neighbors and
maintain neighbor relationships. On a broadcast or point-to-point network, the
Hello protocol dynamically discovers neighbors; however, on a nonbroadcast
multiaccess network, you must manually configure neighbors.
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