OSPF multi-level hierarchy: Necessary at all?

Thu May 27 22:33:27 UTC 1999

Tony Li <tony1 at home.net> wrote:

>I suspect that the main driver is not the amount of routing information
>in the gross sense, but the scalability of the protocol as the number of
>nodes increases.

There's a better solution: decrease the number of nodes by replacing
clusters with bigger boxes.  This has an additional advantage of reducing
number of hops (and, consequently, latency variance).

K.I.S.S. rulez :)

--vadim

PS. Using DUAL or DASM instead of SPF helps, too -- these algorithms tend
    to eliminate updates which "do not matter" unlike SPF-based algorithms
    which have to inform everyone about local topology changes.