A comparison study of single area OSPF Network to multiple area OSPF Network implementation in a Campus area Network

One of the essential elements for all higher educational institutions is a strong campus network. Higher education's campus network today has a hierarchical enterprise campus architecture and is of the highest calibre. Through LAN and Wi-Fi, the campus network is in charge of providing users constant access to the internet and other IT services hosted in the local data centre of the institute. The approach of the hierarchical architecture is based on the high-speed routed core network layer to which numerous independent distribution blocks are connected. The campus Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) between the distribution blocks can be used to connect various campus distribution blocks together for end-to-end IP connection. Examples of such IGP protocols include EIGRP and OSPF. One design principle for the OSPF protocol is to keep the core network in area 0 and all different distribution blocks of the campus in different OSPF areas that are all directly connected to area 0 or core network. Another design principle is to keep a single area campus design covering core and all distribution blocks in a single area i.e. backbone or area 0. In this paper, I use both design aspect using OSPF protocol for routed campus network in a laboratory environment. According to experiment results, a campus network with multiple areas provides advantages over single area design.