OSPF packets

Posted on May 23, 2012

As you probably know there are five types of OSFP packets:

All these packets, except Hellos, are sent only between adjacent
adja routers.

LSA types
There are 5 common LSA types:

Router-LSA and Network-LSA

Network calculate intra-area
area routes describing detailed link
state information.
Network-Summary-LSA LSA calculates inter-area
area routes describing brief routing
information instead of link state information
ASBR-Summary-LSA LSA describes how to reach ASBR
AS-External-LSA describes how to reach destinations outside AS.

LSA header:
What we have to remember is that LS Type, Link State ID and Advertising Router together
uniquely identify LSA, what will be shown later in this post.

Below you can see LSA header in Router-LSA

Router (as an example):

Key fields of OSPF Router-LSA:

Router
Key fields of OSPF Network-LSA:
Network
Notice that different OSPF packets contain different parts of LSA information:

DD LSA header information

LSR LS type, LS ID and advertising router
LSU Complete LSA information
LSAck LSA header information.

Having information described in this post you will be able to calculate OSPF intra-area routes.
Each router calculates the SPT using itself as the root. In the first stage only links between
routers and transit networks are considered. Then, in the second stage, stub networks are
added to the tree as leaves.