A simulation study of the OSPF-OMP routing algorithm

Open shortest path first (OSPF) is the most widely used internal gateway routing protocol on the Internet. However, one shortcoming is that it does not take advantage of the existence of multiple equal-cost paths between source and destination nodes. A well-known variation of OSPF, OSPF-ECMP (ECMP, equal-cost multipath), does exploit the presence of multiple equal-cost paths, but only on a static basis. A variation of OSPF, OSPF-OMP (OMP, optimized multipath), attempts to dynamically determine the optimal allocation of traffic among multiple equal-cost paths based on the exchange of special traffic-load control messages. This paper briefly describes the OSPF-OMP algorithm and the design of a discrete event simulator that models its behavior. We then use this simulator to carry out three experiments that compare the performance of OSPF, OSPF-ECMP, and OSPF-OMP under a range of traffic loads and distributions. Our results show that OSPF-OMP produces improvements in both delivery time an...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CN
• Authors: G. Michael Schneider, Tamás Németh
• Keywords: CN 2002, Equal-cost Multipath, Multiple Equal-cost Paths, OSPF