Network Sales and Services Handbook (Cisco Press Networking Technology)

OSPF is a powerful and feature-rich routing protocol due to its flexibility. OSPF provides a high functionality open protocol standard, enabling inter-vendor networking with the TCP/IP protocol suite. Here are some of the benefits of OSPF:

• Faster convergence than standard distance-vector routing protocols (such as RIP and RIPv2)

• VLSM support

• Authentication

• Hierarchical segmentation

• Route summarization and aggregation, which is needed to handle large and complicated networks