11. The Routing Table Structure
- The Routing Table Structure
The routing table data structure contains all the information necessary to forward an IP data packet toward its destination. Each routing table entry describes the collection of best paths to a particular destination. When forwarding an IP data packet, the routing table entry providing the best match for the packet's IP destination is located. The matching routing table entry then provides the next hop towards the packet's destination. OSPF also provides for the existence of a default route (Destination ID = DefaultDestination, Address Mask = 0x00000000). When the default route exists, it matches all IP destinations (although any other matching entry is a better match). Finding the routing table entry that best matches an IP destination is further described in Section 11.1.
There is a single routing table in each router. Two sample routing tables are described in Sections 11.2 and 11.3. The building of the routing table is discussed in Section 16.
The rest of this section defines the fields found in a routing table entry. The first set of fields describes the routing table entry's destination.
Destination Type Destination type is either "network" or "router". Only network entries are actually used when forwarding IP data traffic. Router routing table entries are used solely as intermediate steps in the routing table build process.
A network is a range of IP addresses, to which IP data traffic may be forwarded. This includes IP networks (class A, B, or C), IP subnets, IP supernets and single IP hosts. The default route also falls into this category.
Router entries are kept for area border routers and AS boundary routers. Routing table entries for area border routers are used when calculating the inter-area routes (see Section 16.2), and when maintaining configured virtual links (see Section 15). Routing table entries for AS boundary routers are used when calculating the AS external routes (see Section 16.4).
Destination ID The destination's identifier or name. This depends on the Destination Type. For networks, the identifier is their associated IP address. For routers, the identifier is the OSPF Router ID.[9]
Address Mask Only defined for networks. The network's IP address together with its address mask defines a range of IP addresses. For IP subnets, the address mask is referred to as the subnet mask. For host routes, the mask is "all ones" (0xffffffff).
Optional Capabilities When the destination is a router this field indicates the optional OSPF capabilities supported by the destination router. The only optional capability defined by this specification is the ability to process AS-external-LSAs. For a further discussion of OSPF's optional capabilities, see Section 4.5.
The set of paths to use for a destination may vary based on the OSPF area to which the paths belong. This means that there may be multiple routing table entries for the same destination, depending on the values of the next field.
Area This field indicates the area whose link state information has led to the routing table entry's collection of paths. This is called the entry's associated area. For sets of AS external paths, this field is not defined. For destinations of type "router", there may be separate sets of paths (and therefore separate routing table entries) associated with each of several areas. For example, this will happen when two area border routers share multiple areas in common. For destinations of type "network", only the set of paths associated with the best area (the one providing the preferred route) is kept.
The rest of the routing table entry describes the set of paths to the destination. The following fields pertain to the set of paths as a whole. In other words, each one of the paths contained in a routing table entry is of the same path-type and cost (see below).
Path-type There are four possible types of paths used to route traffic to the destination, listed here in decreasing order of preference: intra-area, inter-area, type 1 external or type 2 external. Intra-area paths indicate destinations belonging to one of the router's attached areas. Inter-area paths are paths to destinations in other OSPF areas. These are discovered through the examination of received summary-LSAs. AS external paths are paths to destinations external to the AS. These are detected through the examination of received AS-external-LSAs.
Cost The link state cost of the path to the destination. For all paths except type 2 external paths this describes the entire path's cost. For Type 2 external paths, this field describes the cost of the portion of the path internal to the AS. This
cost is calculated as the sum of the costs of the path's constituent links.
Type 2 cost Only valid for type 2 external paths. For these paths, this field indicates the cost of the path's external portion. This cost has been advertised by an AS boundary router, and is the most significant part of the total path cost. For example, a type 2 external path with type 2 cost of 5 is always preferred over a path with type 2 cost of 10, regardless of the cost of the two paths' internal components.
Link State Origin Valid only for intra-area paths, this field indicates the LSA (router-LSA or network-LSA) that directly references the destination. For example, if the destination is a transit network, this is the transit network's network-LSA. If the destination is a stub network, this is the router-LSA for the attached router. The LSA is discovered during the shortest-path tree calculation (see Section 16.1). Multiple LSAs may reference the destination, however a tie-breaking scheme always reduces the choice to a single LSA. The Link State Origin field is not used by the OSPF protocol, but it is used by the routing table calculation in OSPF's Multicast routing extensions (MOSPF).
When multiple paths of equal path-type and cost exist to a destination (called elsewhere "equal-cost" paths), they are stored in a single routing table entry. Each one of the "equal-cost" paths is distinguished by the following fields:
Next hop The outgoing router interface to use when forwarding traffic to the destination. On broadcast, Point-to-MultiPoint and NBMA networks, the next hop also includes the IP address of the next router (if any) in the path towards the destination.
Advertising router Valid only for inter-area and AS external paths. This field indicates the Router ID of the router advertising the summary- LSA or AS-external-LSA that led to this path.
11.1. Routing table lookup
When an IP data packet is received, an OSPF router finds the routing table entry that best matches the packet's destination. This routing table entry then provides the outgoing interface and next hop router to use in forwarding the packet. This section describes the process of finding the best matching routing table entry.
Before the lookup begins, "discard" routing table entries should be inserted into the routing table for each of the router's active area address ranges (see Section 3.5). (An area range is considered "active" if the range contains one or more networks reachable by intra-area paths.) The destination of a "discard" entry is the set of addresses described by its associated active area address range, and the path type of each "discard" entry is set to "inter-area".[10]
Several routing table entries may match the destination address. In this case, the "best match" is the routing table entry that provides the most specific (longest) match. Another way of saying this is to choose the entry that specifies the narrowest range of IP addresses.[11] For example, the entry for the address/mask pair of (128.185.1.0, 0xffffff00) is more specific than an entry for the pair (128.185.0.0, 0xffff0000). The default route is the least specific match, since it matches all destinations. (Note that for any single routing table entry, multiple paths may be possible. In these cases, the calculations in Sections 16.1, 16.2, and 16.4 always yield the paths having the most preferential path-type, as described in Section 11).
If there is no matching routing table entry, or the best match routing table entry is one of the above "discard" routing table entries, then the packet's IP destination is considered unreachable. Instead of being forwarded, the packet should then be discarded and an ICMP destination unreachable message should be returned to the packet's source.
11.2. Sample routing table, without areas
Consider the Autonomous System pictured in Figure 2. No OSPF areas have been configured. A single metric is shown per
outbound interface. The calculation of Router RT6's routing table proceeds as described in Section 2.2. The resulting routing table is shown in Table 12. Destination types are abbreviated: Network as "N", Router as "R".
There are no instances of multiple equal-cost shortest paths in this example. Also, since there are no areas, there are no inter-area paths.
Routers RT5 and RT7 are AS boundary routers. Intra-area routes have been calculated to Routers RT5 and RT7. This allows external routes to be calculated to the destinations advertised by RT5 and RT7 (i.e., Networks N12, N13, N14 and N15). It is assumed all AS-external-LSAs originated by RT5 and RT7 are advertising type 1 external metrics. This results in type 1 external paths being calculated to destinations N12-N15.
11.3. Sample routing table, with areas
Consider the previous example, this time split into OSPF areas. An OSPF area configuration is pictured in Figure 6. Router RT4's routing table will be described for this area configuration. Router RT4 has a connection to Area 1 and a backbone connection. This causes Router RT4 to view the AS as the concatenation of the two graphs shown in Figures 7 and 8. The resulting routing table is displayed in Table 13.
Again, Routers RT5 and RT7 are AS boundary routers. Routers RT3, RT4, RT7, RT10 and RT11 are area border routers. Note that there are two routing entries for the area border router RT3, since it has two areas in common with RT4 (Area 1 and the backbone).
Backbone paths have been calculated to all area border routers. These are used when determining the inter-area routes. Note that all of the inter-area routes are associated with the backbone; this is always the case when the calculating router is itself an area border router. Routing information is condensed at area boundaries. In this example, we assume that Area 3 has been defined so that networks N9-N11 and the host route to H1
Type Dest Area Path Type Cost Next Adv. Hop(s) Router(s)
N N1 0 intra-area 10 RT3 * N N2 0 intra-area 10 RT3 * N N3 0 intra-area 7 RT3 * N N4 0 intra-area 8 RT3 * N Ib 0 intra-area 7 * * N Ia 0 intra-area 12 RT10 * N N6 0 intra-area 8 RT10 * N N7 0 intra-area 12 RT10 * N N8 0 intra-area 10 RT10 * N N9 0 intra-area 11 RT10 * N N10 0 intra-area 13 RT10 * N N11 0 intra-area 14 RT10 * N H1 0 intra-area 21 RT10 * R RT5 0 intra-area 6 RT5 * R RT7 0 intra-area 8 RT10 *
N N12 * type 1 ext. 10 RT10 RT7 N N13 * type 1 ext. 14 RT5 RT5 N N14 * type 1 ext. 14 RT5 RT5 N N15 * type 1 ext. 17 RT10 RT7
Table 12: The routing table for Router RT6 (no configured areas).
are all condensed to a single route when advertised into the backbone (by Router RT11). Note that the cost of this route is the maximum of the set of costs to its individual components.
There is a virtual link configured between Routers RT10 and RT11. Without this configured virtual link, RT11 would be unable to advertise a route for networks N9-N11 and Host H1 into the backbone, and there would not be an entry for these networks in Router RT4's routing table.
In this example there are two equal-cost paths to Network N12. However, they both use the same next hop (Router RT5).
Router RT4's routing table would improve (i.e., some of the paths in the routing table would become shorter) if an additional virtual link were configured between Router RT4 and Router RT3. The new virtual link would itself be associated with the first entry for area border router RT3 in Table 13 (an intra-area path through Area 1). This would yield a cost of 1 for the virtual link. The routing table entries changes that would be caused by the addition of this virtual link are shown
Type Dest Area Path Type Cost Next Adv. Hops(s) Router(s)
N N1 1 intra-area 4 RT1 * N N2 1 intra-area 4 RT2 * N N3 1 intra-area 1 * * N N4 1 intra-area 3 RT3 * R RT3 1 intra-area 1 * *
N Ib 0 intra-area 22 RT5 * N Ia 0 intra-area 27 RT5 * R RT3 0 intra-area 21 RT5 * R RT5 0 intra-area 8 * * R RT7 0 intra-area 14 RT5 * R RT10 0 intra-area 22 RT5 * R RT11 0 intra-area 25 RT5 *
N N6 0 inter-area 15 RT5 RT7 N N7 0 inter-area 19 RT5 RT7 N N8 0 inter-area 18 RT5 RT7 N N9-N11,H1 0 inter-area 36 RT5 RT11
N N12 * type 1 ext. 16 RT5 RT5,RT7 N N13 * type 1 ext. 16 RT5 RT5 N N14 * type 1 ext. 16 RT5 RT5 N N15 * type 1 ext. 23 RT5 RT7
Table 13: Router RT4's routing table in the presence of areas.
in Table 14.