Which type of protocol is OSPF?
A.
link-state protocol
B.
distance-vector protocol
C.
path-vector protocol
D.
modified distance-vector protocol
Explanation:
OSPF is an interior gateway protocol that routes Internet Protocol (IP) packets solely within a single routing domain (autonomous system). It gathers link state information from available routers and constructs a topology map of the network. The topology determines the routing table presented to the Internet Layer which makes routing decisions based solely on the destination IP address found in IP packets. OSPF was designed to support variable-length subnet masking (VLSM) or Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) addressing models.OSPF detects changes in the topology, such as link failures, very quickly and converges on a new loop-free routing structure within seconds. It computes the shortest path tree for each route using a method based on Dijkstra’s algorithm, a shortest path first algorithm.
The link-state information is maintained on each router as a link-state database (LSDB) which is a tree-image of the entire network topology. Identical copies of the LSDB are periodically updated through flooding on all OSPF routers.