Session

The Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) interior routing protocol is an open-standard that is widely deployed in enterprise and tactical networks. OSPFv2 only supports IPv4, while OSPFv3 originally only supported IPv6. More recently, OSPFv3 standards have been enhanced so that OSPFv3 can carry both IPv4 and IPv6 topology information and so that OSPFv3 can be deployed over IPv4. By implementing RFC7949, OSPFv3 becomes the routing protocol of choice over both IPv4 and IPv6 transports. This paper shows that in low-speed tactical networks, replacing OSPFv2 with OSPFv3 over IPv4 transport not only facilitates the eventual migration to IPv6, but also enables reduction in overhead bandwidth when compared to OSPFv3 over IPv6 transport. The needed enhancements were implemented based on an open-source routing software called FRRouting.