Subject: Protocol Action: 'Graceful OSPF Restart' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 15:59:32 -0400

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.