Experiences With Monitoring OSPF on a Regional Service Provider Network

  • Authors:
  • David Watson;Farnam Jahanian;Craig Labovitz

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICDCS '03 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This paper presents the results from a detailed, experimentalstudy of OSPF, an intra-domain routing protocol,running on a mid-size regional Internet service provider.Using multiple, distributed probes running custom monitoringtools, we collected continuous protocol informationfor a full year. We use this data to analyze the health ofthe network including the amount, source, duration and periodicityof routing instability. We found that informationfrom external routing protocols produces significant levelsof instability within OSPF. We also examine the evolutionof the routing topology over time, showing that short termchanges are incremental and that the long term trend showsconstant change. Finally, we present a set of detailed investigationsinto several large scale anomalies. These anomaliesdemonstrate the significant impact external routing protocolshave on OSPF. In addition, they highlight the need fornew network management tools that can incorporate informationfrom routing protocols.