By Luan Pham

One of our projects at MapleWorks in the last year required us to integrate the Open Shortest Path First protocol (OSPF) into a residential gateway product. Since OSPF is a mature protocol, and many implementations existed, it was our task to determine which OSPF stack was most suitable given timeline constraints that surround any onshore software development project.

Based on our experience, IP Infusion was the natural choice as it provided everything we needed in a modular architecture. However there was some natural scepticism about our decision, and this resulted in a survey of all the OSPF offerings that we knew of or could find on the Internet. We summarized our findings in the table below. Our survey was performed in May 2007, and much of the accuracy of the information was dependant on technical documentation publicly available at the time.

Description of columns:

OSPF Stack Vendor: IP Infusion, Data Connection, Aricent, XORP, Vyatta, Ospfd, OpenOSPFD, Zebra

Modular Architecture: Is OSPF decoupled from the RTM and other routing protocols? In the future there may be a requirement to have RIP and OSPF running at the same time. A non modular architecture would make it difficult to integrate RIP with OSPF so that both protocols run at the same time.

Management API: Does OSPF come with a clean management API to provision the protocol?

Maturity: How long has the protocol been around? Usually the longer its been around, the more bugs it has resolved making it a more solid product. This is where commercial offerings beat Open Source options.

Cross compiling: Has the code been written to support processors with big endian as well as little endian? Most development is done on PCs which uses little endian, and all too often when code goes from one processor to another, issues with byte alignment arise. These automatically introduce bugs, and will take incur additional costs in time and money.

Open Source: Is the product open source?

Extra cost incurred relative to IP Infusion: Since the IP Infusion stack contained everything that was required for the project, it was used as a baseline to compare against all other offerings.

(Luan Pham is a Senior Software Engineer of MapleWorks Technology Inc, the smart choice for onshore software development for networking and telecom companies.)