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Understanding OSPF Route Summarization

Area border routers (ABRs) send summary link advertisements to describe the routes to other areas. Depending on the number of destinations, an area can get flooded with a large number of link-state records, which can utilize routing device resources. To minimize the number of advertisements that are flooded into an area, you can configure the ABR to coalesce, or summarize, a range of IP addresses and send reachability information about these addresses in a single link-state advertisement (LSA). You can summarize one or more ranges of IP addresses, where all routes that match the specified area range are filtered at the area boundary, and the summary is advertised in their place.

For an OSPF area, you can summarize and filter intra-area prefixes. All routes that match the specified area range are filtered at the area boundary, and the summary is advertised in their place. For an OSPF not-so-stubby area (NSSA), you can only coalesce or filter NSSA external (Type 7) LSAs before they are translated into AS external (Type 5) LSAs and enter the backbone area. All external routes learned within the area that do not fall into the range of one of the prefixes are advertised individually to other areas.

In addition, you can also limit the number of prefixes (routes) that are exported into OSPF. By setting a user-defined maximum number of prefixes, you prevent the routing device from flooding an excessive number of routes into an area.

 

Related Documentation

 

Published: 2012-12-08

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