An Architecture for a Hardware Implementation of the OSPF Protocol

The problem of finding a shortest path is common to many different fields including transportation systems, mechanical systems and computer communications. Most telecommunication industry protocols like PNNI, OSPF and IS-IS use Dijkstra’s algorithm or Bellman-Ford’s algorithm to solve the shortest path problem. Today shortest path computations are performed in software which is inefficient for realtime applications using data communication facilities that are sensitive to delay. This paper proposes a hardware architecture for the OSPF protocol to address overall system delay.