Performance Measurement of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) Protocol in IP Networks

OSPF router keeps track of the state of all the various network connections (links) between itself and a network it is trying to send data. This makes it a link-state routing protocol. Routers maintain a routing table for successful delivery of the packets from the source node to the correct destined node. Routing plays an important role in forwarding the packets from source to destination. This project is based on overview of OSPF comprising different types of routes, routers, networks, areas, and protocols used in OSPF. We used OPNET IT Guru Academic Edition 9.1 network simulator for six different network scenarios to calculate the shortest path from source to destination router. The simulation developed with different parameters and is configured based on OSPF area and link failure using traffic sent in bits/seconds as performance metric. The comparative results showed that the balance area OSPF is performed better in finding the shortest path for traffic sent after a link fails for a delay of 100 seconds giving two alternate routes from source to destination routers. Also we were tested the routing tables of the small ring topology to gain a better understanding of each routing protocol's metric calculations and path routing systems.