Communication Service Provider's Choice between OSPF and IS-IS Dynamic Routing Protocols and Implementation Criteria Using OPNET

This paper presents th implementation criteria to be made when th choice is between OSPF and IS-IS protocols that ar link state protocols and use the same Dijkstra algorithm for computing the best path through the network. Here a comparison is made between different parameters and a detailed simulation study is performed on the network with OSPF and IS-IS routing protocols and it has been shown that IS-IS provides a better network and router convergence time, less bandwidth requirements and better throughput and queuing delay compared to OSPF. OSPF and IS-IS are the dynamic routing protocols being used in the practical networks to propagate network topology information to the neighboring routers. There have been a large number of dynamic routing protocols available but choice of the right protocol for routing is dependent on many parameters critical being network convergence time, scalability, memory and CPU requirements, security and bandwidth requirement etc.