32 Copyright © All rights are reserved by Alamgir Naushad. Current Trends in Computer Sciences & Applications Mini Review Mini Overview of Key Issues in Routing for OSPF MANETs Alamgir Naushad*, Muhammad Tanveer and Abd Ullah Khan Faculty of Computer Sciences and Engineering, GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Pakistan *Corresponding author: Alamgir Naushad, Faculty of Computer Sciences and Engineering, GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Topi 23640, Pakistan Received: January 28, 2019 Published: February 04, 2019 Abstract Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a well known and prominent Internet Protocol (IP) for network routing. By deploying a link state routing (LSR) algorithm OSPF comes under the category of interior gateway routing protocols. In today’s wireless ad hoc Internet, the current routing domain needs to maintain a peak level of service accessibility and availability, thus OSPF must be extended to the wireless ad hoc network for maximizing routing performance in the network by taking into account key routing issues, i.e., optimal Hello Interval, efficient flooding schemes, optimizing the traffic engineering related issues, optimum adjacency creations, connectivity factors, reducing control overhead, and QoS and security challenges. In addition, OSPF is very effective in its adoption of handling the network bandwidth utilization, therefore, wireless capacity planning is of utmost importance for today’s Internet with the possible presence of wireless infrastructure. Improving routing stability in OSPF MANET under topology change(s) due to variation in link connectivity becomes a very demanding challenge for the research community. Given a fascinating volume of review for literature and unavoidable importance relating to OSPF extension to MANETs, there has still persist a need to highlight key issues related with routing in OSPF MANET. Keywords: MANETs; Routing; OSPF; Traffic Engineering; Connectivity Factors; Capacity Planning; Flooding Schemes Introduction Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a very well-known and prominent interior gateway protocol (responsible for routing) in the today’s Internet [1]. The routing functionality of such protocols can be seen within the domain, which can be, but not necessarily, is part of or contained within an autonomous system (AS). OSPF as part of the routing protocol comes under the group of link state routing protocol, which generally allows every router present in the network to learn about the complete network topology [2]. However, in order to achieve maximum routing performance, it is now for almost more than 3 decades that the Internet protocols for link state routing has been deployed in the Internet on the regular basis. When we go back in history, the first major and functional link state routing protocol was deployed in the year 1978, called the Shortest Path First (SPF) by replacing the popular distance vector approach in ARPANET at that time. The OSPF Protocol is now being used by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for almost more than 25 years as a link state routing functionality in providing the Internet infrastructure. The maximum years of experience running with the OSPF Protocol and its wide spread deployment has put a lot of confidence in using it as a reliable and stable link state routing and has demanded and motivated the researchers from all over the world to put in the efforts to create room for further improvements and enhancements in its application for extending its operation to wireless ad hoc media in MANETs. As a matter of fact, the quality of service (QoS) requirements and the attributes of the routing infrastructures in MANETs is a demanding challenge as the network topology is frequently changing due to mobility [3,4]. The objective function of the OSPF-MANET Protocol is to provide highly scalable routing functionality and more flexible and robust operation on complex and highly dense networks. The prime concern in today 0 s wireless media is to somehow keep in limit the bandwidth processing requirements of the protocol while recovering from the network failure (Speed of Convergence) in the network topology is the prime concern [3,5]. Whenever there is a triggered event in the OSPF-MANET domain, in such case the ISSN: 2643-6744 DOI: 10.32474/CTCSA.2019.01.000109