OSPF vs. IS-IS on OPNET

OSPF vs. IS-IS on OPNET



Abstract

This study aimed to understand the working of OSPF and IS-IS protocols. These protocols are among the most widely used IGP protocols used in the networking industry. In order to compare the merits and demerits of both the protocols, a critical analysis of the literary material available on the protocols was conducted. The important factors including scalability, security, performance and reliability were analyzed in the study. The two protocols are far more similar than different from each others. There are few factors that favor one protocol under certain conditions whereas; the other protocol takes the lead when comparison is done on certain other factors.

OSPF vs. IS-IS on OPNET

Introduction

Traditional routing protocols select paths based on static link weights and converge to new paths only when there is an outright reachability failure (such as a link or router failure). This design allows routing scale to hundreds of thousands of nodes, but it comes at the cost of functionality: routing provides only simple, single path connectivity. Networked applications in the wide-area, enterprise, and data center can all benefit from network protocols that allow traffic to be sent over multiple routes en route to a destination. This ability, also called multipath routing, has other significant benefits over single-path routing, such as more efficiently using network resources and recovering more quickly from network disruptions (Shen, 2000, pp. 41).

Networked applications in the wide-area, enterprise, and data center can all benefit from network protocols that allow traffic to be sent over multiple paths en route to a destination. This mechanism, called multipath routing, can reduce latency, improve throughput, or improve robustness to network failures.

Applications that can benefit from multipath routing range from real-time applications such as network voice over IP and video to bulk-transfer applications; notably, each of these obtains a different benefit from multipath routing e.g., voice over IP can pick a path which has lower latency and jitter to improve the voice quality and a bulk-transfer application can simultaneously utilize multiple paths to achieve higher throughput.

Providing these desired benefits are numerous mechanisms for multipath routing, each of which may be more or less beneficial to different classes of applications (Feamster, 2007, pp. 253). Each multipath mechanism has typically come with its own, unique way of allowing applications to specify a path to use. The unfortunate consequence of this is that there is neither a standard multipath interface, nor a set of applications ready to make use of any multipath mechanisms that could become available. The lack of a flexible, widely-applicable interface inhibits adoption of multipath mechanisms (there exist no applications that can use them) and imposes high barriers for researchers attempting to compare different approaches (Jangeun, 2006, pp. 6).

Literature Review

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) was developed by the interior gateway protocol (IGP) working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force. It was made to serve as a better alternative to RIP for Internet Protocol (IP). The group had been formed in order to design a routing ...