An Investigation and Comparison of Routing Protocols on a Load Balanced Network and the Study of Link Failure and Link Recovery

ABSTRACT.

Routing protocol has taken some vital roles in this modern internet era. Routing protocol determines how routers communicates with each other to enable the forwarding of packets that takes place through the use of optimal path which enables transmission from one source node to the destination node. In this study work, the exploration of the important protocols, namely; Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP), Open Short Path First protocol (OSPF), Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Intermediate System to Intermediate Systems (IS-IS), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP); are investigated and compared in this work. The evaluation of these routing protocols are achieved on the essence of the quantitative matrices such as the convergence time and duration, Jitter, End to End delay, packet sent and receives, link failure and recovery, throughput and packet Loss via the simulated network models. Furthermore, the internet traffic is increasing, and it is its nature to change because of the new applications. Multimedia applications need more bandwidth reservations that were not required at the initial state when the file transmissions dominated on the Internet. Point to point applications are making traffic configurations impossible to predict, but the traffic loads which are generated at the nodes, demands to be routed regardless of the traffic configuration. When the fixed node traffic loads are identified, the distribution arrangement can be made simple. It is shown that the shortest path routing (SPR) protocols used on the Internet today do not increase the guaranteed node traffic loads, and do not offer scalable and fast broadcast arrangement. Load balancing can improve the network throughput for random traffic pattern. In this dissertation study work, the implementation and analysis of a routing protocol using the OPNET Simulator tool will be practicalized using a load balanced network.

Keywords: Routing, OSPF, RIP, IS-IS, EIGRP, BGP, Load Balanced, Network Convergence Activity and Duration, Link Failure and Link Recovery, Traffic sent and Received.

Table of Contents

DECLARATION. ........................................................................................................................................ ii

CERTIFICATION. ...................................................................................................................................... iii

DEDICATION. .......................................................................................................................................... iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. ........................................................................................................................ v

ABBREVIATIONS. ..................................................................................................................................... g

ABSTRACT. ............................................................................................................................................... 0

CHAPTER ONE. ........................................................................................................................................ 1

INTRODUCTION. ..................................................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Background of the study. .............................................................................................................. 1

1.2 Title, Aims, and Objectives of the Study. ............................................................................... 1

1.3 Statement of the Research Questions. .................................................................................. 2

1.4 Scope of the Study. ....................................................................................................................... 2

1.5 Research Methodology: ............................................................................................................... 2

1.6 Structure of the Work. .................................................................................................................. 3

CHAPTER TWO. ....................................................................................................................................... 4

LITERATURE REVIEW. ............................................................................................................................ 4

2.0 Introduction. ..................................................................................................................................... 4

2.1 Routing Protocol Theory. ............................................................................................................. 4

2.2 Network Routing Table Formation. ........................................................................................... 5

2.3 Network Load balancing. .............................................................................................................. 8

2.4 Design Requirements for a Routing Protocol. ....................................................................... 9

2.4.1 Optimality. ............................................................................................................................. 9

2.4.2 Reducing the routing information exchange. ............................................................... 9

2.4.3 Reducing the processing load on routers. ..................................................................... 10

2.4.4 Faster Convergence. ...................................................................................................... 10

2.4.5 Scalability. ..................................................................................................................... 11

2.4.6 Robustness. ................................................................................................................... 11

2.5 Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). ............................................................................... 11

2.6 Routing Information Protocol (RIP).................................................................................. 14

2.7 Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP). ............................................ 15

2.8 Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS). ................................................. 17

2.8.1 IS-IS Metric Calculation proposal. ............................................................................................ 18

2.9 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). ................................................................................................ 18

2.10 Summary. .................................................................................................................................. 21

CHAPTER THREE. ................................................................................................................................... 23

NETWORK TOPOLOGY MODEL. ............................................................................................................. 23

3.1 Introduction. ............................................................................................................................... 23

3.2. Description of Parameter used. ................................................................................................. 23

3.3 Network Topology Model Design. .............................................................................................. 24

3.4 Traffic Distribution. ..................................................................................................................... 26

3.4.1 Per-packet. ................................................................................................................................ 26

3.4.2 Per-destination......................................................................................................................... 27

3.4.2 Per-source and destination. ............................................................................................... 27

3.5. OPNET Simulator. ................................................................................................................... 29

3.6 Validation of Network System Model. .......................................................................... 30

3.7 Summary. ................................................................................................................................ 35

CHAPTER FOUR. ............................................................................................................................. 37

NETWORK MODEL DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION. ................................................................ 37

4.1 Introduction. ............................................................................................................................... 37

4.2 Network Design Topology Implementation. ................................................................... 37

4.3 System Model Design Justification. ................................................................................... 42

4.4 Simulation Result Collection. ................................................................................................ 43

3.5 Summary: .................................................................................................................................... 55

CHAPTER FIVE ....................................................................................................................................... 56

RESULT ANALYSIS ............................................................................................................................. 56

5.1 Introduction. ............................................................................................................................... 56

5.2 Result Analysis on Load Balanced Network Model. .................................................... 56

5.3 Result Analysis on load balanced with Link Failure and Recovery. ..................... 59

5.4 Summary. .................................................................................................................................... 62

CHAPTER SIX. ................................................................................................................................... 64

DISCUSSION. .................................................................................................................................... 64

6.1 Introduction. ............................................................................................................................... 64

6.2 Discussion and Observation. ............................................................................................... 64

6.3 Summary. .................................................................................................................................... 69

Chapter Seven ....................................................................................................................................... 71

7.1 Conclusion. ...................................................................................................................................... 71

7.2 Limitations. ..................................................................................................................................... 72

7.3 Area of Future Work. ................................................................................................................. 72

References: ........................................................................................................................................... 73