A Route Flap Suppression Mechanism Based on Dynamic Timers in OSPF Network

Route flap caused by link flap in OSPF always lead to network instability and unreliability. Most of the prevailing solutions are network-wide and require all routers to participate in the route flap suppressing process, which not only lack flexibility and scalability but also occupy additional computation resources across the network. In this paper, a localized approach is proposed to suppress the routing flap through dynamically tuning the hello interval of OSPF. To support the real-time adjustment of the hello timer, an analytical model is also established to investigate the relationship between link flap and route flap. Simulation results show that our approach can achieve better performance in eliminating routing flap and at the same time consume much less computation resources than the network-wide method.