Optimized and adaptive link state routing strategy

Abstract

The dominant link state protocols like OSPF despite their advantages require the flooding of new information across the entire routing area after changes in any link state. With the growth of the network diameter or the frequency of link-state changes increases, the overhead in terms of bandwidth and processing cost, of flooding becomes prohibitive. Furthermore, such flooding over a large area will cause unnecessary overhead on the links, potentially creating many transient routing loops that can last for a long time. This limits the scalability of the routing protocols to large routing areas. To overcome such problems, we present in this paper an Optimized and Adaptive Link-State Protocol (OALP), a modification to the existing link-state routing protocol that does not require the state of each link to be flooded to the entire internetwork all the time, or to entire areas if we monitor the activity status of the nodes in the internetwork. Thus minimizing the amount of information distributed by link-state routing protocols. There are primarily two modes in which we devise the network to operate depending the activity levels of the incumbent nodes. Depending on the activity levels an optimized flooding procedure is provided which would greatly reduce the number of advertisements flowing through the network.