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Network Working Group                               Padma Pillay-Esnault
Internet Draft                                          Juniper Networks
                                                            January
							      March 2003
Category: Standards Track

Expires: June October 2003                                          


         OSPF Refresh and Flooding Reduction in Stable Topologies

                draft-pillay-esnault-ospf-flooding-04.txt

                draft-pillay-esnault-ospf-flooding-05.txt

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All Rights Reserved.


1. Abstract

   This document describes an extension to the OSPF protocol to 
   eliminate or reduce periodic flooding of Link State Advertisements
   in stable topologies.

   The current behavior of OSPF requires that all LSAs be refreshed
   every 30 minutes regardless of the stability of the network except
   for DoNotAge LSAs. This document proposes to generalize the use of
   DoNotAge LSAs so as to reduce protocol traffic in stable topologies.
   
Pillay-Esnault                  Standards Track                                                  [Page 1]

Internet Draft       OSPF Refresh and Flooding Reduction     January      March 2003


2. Motivation

   The explosive growth of IP based networks has placed the focus on the 
   scalability of the Interior Gateway Protocols such as OSPF. Networks 
   using OSPF are larger everyday growing every day and will continue to expand to 
   accommodate the demand to connect for connections to the Internet or intranets.   
   Internet Service Providers and users having large networks have 
   noticed non-negligible protocol traffic even when their network 
   topology was 
   topologies were stable.

   OSPF requires every LSA to be refreshed every 1800 seconds or else 
   they will expire when they reach 3600 seconds [1].

   This document proposes to overcome the LSA expiration by generalizing
   the use of DoNotAge LSAs. This technique will facilitate OSPF 
   scaling by reducing OSPF traffic overhead in stable topologies.
   
   
3. Changes in the existing implementation.
   
   This enhancement relies heavily on the OSPF Demand Circuit extension.
   The details of the implementation of the DC-bit, DoNotAge bit and 
   the Indication-LSA are specified in "Extending OSPF to Support 
   Demand Circuits" [2].
   
   The Flooding Reduction flooding reduction capable routers will continue to send hellos 
   to their neighbors but and keep their aging self-originated LSAs in 
   their database. However, they will flood their Link State Advertisements
   (LSAs) self-originated LSAs
   with the DoNotAge bit set. Hence, self-originated LSAs need not be 
   reflooded unless there is change in the contents of the LSA. This 
   will reduce the protocol traffic overhead while allowing changes to
   be flooded immediately.

















Pillay-Esnault                  Standards Track                                                  [Page 2]

Internet Draft       OSPF Refresh and Flooding Reduction     January      March 2003


4. Deployment

4.1 Backward Compatibility

   Routers supporting the OSPF Demand Circuit capability.

   All routers supporting OSPF Demand Circuit demand circuit extensions [2] will be
   able to 
   interoperate with the correctly process DoNotAge LSAs flooded by routers
   supporting the flooding reduction. 

   For routers supporting OSPF Demand Circuits but do NOT support the
   new Flooding Reduction reduction capability but have to interoperate with described herein.
   These routers having the  Flooding Reduction capability there are two 
   possibilities:

   (1) Demand Circuit is not configured
   In this case, the router older implementation will send its LSAs 
   without the DoNotAge bit set and it will need to refresh its LSAs 
   periodically. It will however receive also suppress flooding DoNotAge LSAs from the 
   flooding reduction capable routers and will keep them as such in
   its own database.
  
   (2) Demand Circuit is on 
   interfaces configured
   All DC routers as demand circuits. However, they will set the DoNotAge bit also
   flood DoNotLSAs on their own LSAs and will 
   suppress hellos. The flooding reduction capable routers will run as
   DC as well.

4.2 Router interfaces which are not supporting configured as demand
   circuits. 

   When there are routers in the OSPF Demand Circuit capability.

   For routers routing domain, stub area,
   or NSSA area that do not support OSPF Demand Circuit Feature have no
   knowledge how to handle DoNotAge LSAs and the LSAs with demand circuit extensions [2]
   then the DoNotAge
   bit set use of these flooding reduction capability will appear as expired LSAs in their own database. 

   The DCbitless LSAs must be used here 
   subject to detect the presence demand circuit interoperability constraints 
   articulated in section 2.5 of those 
   routers not supporting the "Extending OSPF to Support Demand Circuit and indication LSAs 
   Circuits" [2]. This implies that detection of an LSA with the DC 
   bit clear will be use as described result in [2] to inform other routers of the
   presence re-origination of routers incapable to handling self-originated 
   DoNotAge LSAs. In the 
   presence of routers not supporting DC-bit, the Flooding Reduction 
   capable routers must flush all LSAs with the DoNotAge LSAs clear and revert to 
   sending normal aging purging of 
   non-self-originated DoNotAge LSAs.


5. Configuration of the Flooding Reduction flooding reduction capable routers    
   
   The implementations    
   
   Implementations of Flooding Reduction this flooding reduction capability must provide a
   knob to activate/deactivate the feature and by default it should be
   disabled. It should be also The flooding reduction capability can be enabled globally 
   or on selected interfaces. It should be also possible to specify a 
   forced periodic
   refresh flooding interval of Link State Advertisements. 

 


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Internet Draft      OSPF Refresh and Flooding Reduction     January 2003 unchanged self-originated LSAs. 


6. Security Considerations

   This memo does not create any new security issues for the OSPF
   protocol. Security considerations for the base OSPF protocol are
   covered in [1].

   
 











Pillay-Esnault                                                  [Page 3]

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7. Acknowledgments

   The author would like to thank Jean-Michel Esnault, Barry Friedman,
   Thomas Kramer, Acee Lindem, Peter Psenak and Psenak, Henk Smit and Alex Zinin 
   for their helpful comments on this work.


8. Normative References

   [1] RFC 2328 OSPF Version 2. J. Moy. April 1998.

   [2] RFC 1793 Extending OSPF to Support Demand Circuits. J. Moy. 
   April 1995.


9. Authors' Addresses

   Padma Pillay-Esnault
   Juniper Networks
   1194 N, Mathilda Avenue
   Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1206

   Email: padma@juniper.net


























Pillay-Esnault                  Standards Track                                                  [Page 4]

Internet Draft      OSPF Refresh and Flooding Reduction     January 2003


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Internet Draft      OSPF Refresh and Flooding Reduction     January 2003



   HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
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