The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Graceful OSPF Restart' <draft-ietf-ospf-hitless-restart-08.txt> as a Proposed Standard. This document is the product of the Open Shortest Path First IGP Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Alex Zinin and Bill Fenner. Technical Summary This memo documents an enhancement to the OSPF routing protocol, whereby an OSPF router can stay on the forwarding path even as its OSPF software is restarted. This is called "graceful restart" or "non-stop forwarding". Deployment of this mechanism in the service provider networks should decrease unnecessary path recalculation and traffic rerouting. Working Group Summary The WG considered two proposals to address the graceful restart problem--the one represented in draft-nguyen-ospf-restart, and the one described in the submitted document. The main difference between the two proposals was in the mechanism for graceful restart signaling, database synchronization and determining when graceful restart had completed. At the 50th IETF in Minneapolis the WG made a decision via rough consensus to proceed with the latter approach, which since then has receive substantial technical review within the WG and passed the WG Last Call. The described mechanism has been implemented and deployed by several vendors. Protocol Quality The specification has been reviewed for the IESG by Alex Zinin.
