Conformance testing of OSPF protocol

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a widely used protocol for routing within an autonomous system (AS) domain. It has been gaining support as the most popular Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) used in IP networks. The development of OSPF began in 1987 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to address problems related to the ongoing growth of the Internet. This paper introduces GNU Zebra, an open source software that manages TCP/IP based routing protocols. Zebra software is used as a Device Under Test (DUT) and all the test cases are executed to test the compliance of OSPF routing protocol in a network. Testing methodology includes designing of the test cases for testing conformance, performance, functionality and interoperability with various vendors implementations. This testing shall help to verify how well devices supporting OSPF meet industry standards and operational specifications and also avoid costly rework after the product is released in the market.