OSPF: OSPF summarization
OSPF, unlike EIGRP, doesn’t support automatic summarization. Also, unlike EIGRP, where you can summarize routes on every router in an EIGRP network, OSFP can summarize routes only on ABRs and ASBRs. Route summarization helps reduce OSPF traffic and route computation.
The following command is used for OSPF summarization:
(config-router) area AREA_ID range IP_ADDRESS MASK
To better understand OSPF summarization, consider the following figure.
All three routers are running OSPF and exchanging routers. Before OSPF summarization is configured, the router R1 inside the backbone area has two entries for the networks 11.0.0.0/24 and 11.0.1.0/24 in its routing table.
We could summarize these two subnets on R2, so that R1 receive only one routing update for both subnets. To do that, the following command can be used on R2:
Now, R1 has only one entry in its routing table for R3’s directly connected subnets:
NOTE – be careful with summarization. In this case, router R1 thinks that R2 has routes for all subnets in the range 11.0.0.0 – 11.0.255.255. When summarizing, try to be as specific as possible.