Improved OSPF Database Exchange Procedure

When an OSPF router restarts, its stale LSAs are left in the database of other routers in the OSPF domain until the LSAs are aged out either intentionally or by the LSA age elapsing. The stale Router LSA can contain links to all the neighbors that had Full adjacencies before the router restarted.

----------C-------- | | A-----B E-----F | | --------D--------- shows a very simple OSPF network. In case of C undergoing restart that does not generate purges, the other routers in the domain will hold the stale LSA of Router C in their database. The stale LSA may have links to B and E, which represents the topology of C before it went down. When C restarts again, it initiates the database exchange process with B and E. B and E may have C's stale LSA with a higher sequence number in their database than the new ones originated by C and hence assume this is latest copy, successively bringing up the adjacency with C, and transitioning to Full state. Based on C's Stale LSA having LSA links to B and E, the Shortest Path First (SPF) back-link check is satisfied and B and E update their routing table to point to C. This may cause C to drop this traffic as C may not have all its previous adjacencies up and all LSAs in place to correctly compute the necessary routes.

The database exchange procedure from section 7.2 is extended with additional constraints to prevent an OSPF router from transitioning to Full state when it has stale LSAs originated by the database exchange neighbor in its Link State Database (LSDB). During Database exchange, when a router receives an LSA from the neighbor for which such neighbor is the originator of the LSA and the sequence number of the LSA is smaller than the sequence number of its own database copy, the receiving router marks its database copy as stale. This document proposes to create a new LSA list called "Stale LSA List". This list is created on a per neighbor basis and resembles the "LS Request List", the difference being LS Request messages are not sent for stale LSAs. The router creates a "Stale LSA List" for this neighbor and adds stale LSA to the Stale LSA List for the neighbor. This LSA MUST NOT be removed from the Stale LSA list and the adjacency FSM MUST NOT transition to Full state until an LSA with a sequence number greater than its own database copy is received (or strictly speaking, a "more recent" LSA). The Stale LSA List cleanup procedures follow the LSRequest list cleanup procedures as described in

provides an example of C restarting having originated an LSA with sequence number Y before. After restarting C originates the same LSA with sequence number X where X < Y since it is not aware of existence of version X yet.

Sequence:X DBD: LSA A Origin:C <------ Sequence:Y LSReq LSA A, origin C -----> Modified Procedure <------ Add LSA A to Stale LSA List <------- LSA A, Origin C, Seq:Y C re-originating self LSA LSA A, Origin C, -------> Remove Stale Seq:Y+1 LSA A, Origin C From Stale LSA List, Bring adjacency to Full state if both LS Request list and Stale LSA list are empty. ]]> As shown in figure above, E originates LSReq with Sequence number X but waits until the LSA with sequence number Y+1 (or strictly speaking, an LSA that compares as newer to the one it holds) arrives. As the LSA is still in the Stale LSA List, the adjacency will remain in Loading state and will not move to Full state. All the neighbors of the restarting routers hold the neighbor FSM in Loading state and do not transition to Full state until the stale LSA is replaced with the new LSA with higher sequence number than the stale LSA. This ensures that other routers in the network do not compute a path through the restarting router since they cannot satisfy the bi-directionality condition in SPF computations.

No IANA Considerations