Route Flapping Effects on OSPF

Route flap is an undesirable phenomenon in the Internet and needs to be eliminated for more stable and robust networks. In this paper we present our observations of such persistent route flaps on OSPF in some detail. We show how flaps adversely affect OSPF routing and communication environment in general through our experiments. The current OSPF’s implicit timer damping function is found inefficient as each flap may lead to a few seconds of lost connectivity. We implemented a scheme for damping the route flaps and show as to how this methodology can solve such problems in OSPF. Our implementation shows considerable improvement over the ones where none of such techniques were applied.