6.3. OSPF Operation

Routers running the OSPF routing protocol must first establish neighbor adjacencies with its neighbor routers. Routers go through the neighbor adjacency process by exchanging Hello packets with neighboring routers. The following is an overview, to get the discussion going about OSPF operation; I describe each part of the process in much more detail as you move through this section.

  1. The first thing that must happen is neighbor discovery.

    A router sends and receives Hello packets to and from its neighboring routers. The destination address that is typically used is a multicast address. The routers exchange Hello packets and must adhere to some protocol-specific parameters. For OSPF, those parameters are checking whether the ...

Get Cisco® Network Professional's: Advanced Internetworking Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.