What is equal cost load balancing in OSPF?

Like other dynamic routing protocols, OSPF does equal cost load balancing, and if you have routes with equal cost paths to the same destination, then OSPF will do load sharing. Unlike Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), OSPF can’t do unequal cost load balancing.

What algorithm is used by OSPF if equal cost routes exist?

Packets are then routed along the shortest path using the shortest-path-first (SPF) algorithm. If multiple equal-cost paths exist between a source and destination address, OSPF routes packets along each path alternately, in round-robin fashion.

What is ECMP protocol?

Equal-cost multipath (ECMP) is a network routing strategy that allows for traffic of the same session, or flow—that is, traffic with the same source and destination—to be transmitted across multiple paths of equal cost.

Does OSPF support unequal load balancing?

OSPF defaults to equal-cost load balancing. In other words, it load-shares across equal-cost links only. In order to enable OSPF unequal-cost load balancing, you use the bandwidth command on the interface.

What is equal cost load balancing?

Equal-cost load balancing, as its name implies, is the balancing of a traffic load across redundant links of equal cost.

What is OSPF ECMP?

The ECMP feature allows OSPF to add routes with multiple next-hop addresses and with equal costs to a given destination in the forwarding information base (FIB) on the routing switch.

What protocol does OSPF use?

OSPF runs over Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), but does not use a transport protocol, such as UDP or TCP. It encapsulates its data directly in IP packets with protocol number 89.

How does OSPF ECMP work?

Does OSPF support ECMP?

Is ECMP load balancing?

Load balancing between ECMP paths is performed on IOS-XE based CEF object called loadbalance. Load balancing is a forwarding mechanism that distributes traffic over multiple links based on certain parameters. ECMP Per-Flow Load Balancing distributes packets across multiple links based on Layer 3 routing information.

Which of the following protocol supports unequal cost load balancing?

One of the advantages of EIGRP is that, unlike OSPF and many other routing protocols, EIGRP also supports unequal-cost load balancing. You can set up your router to load balance over links with different metric to reach the destination.

What is the advantage of equal cost load balancing?

This alleviates the potential for problems caused by per-packet load balancing but can result in a somewhat less than perfect distribution of traffic across equal-cost links.