Category: IS-IS

You might have wondered why no link-state routing protocols support unequal-cost load balancing (UCLB). Petr Lapukhov provides part of the answer in his Understanding Unequal-Cost Load-Balancing article: EIGRP is one of those few protocols that can ensure a neighbor is not using the current router as its next-hop.

However, one has to wonder: with OSPF and IS-IS having the entire network topology (or at least the intra-area part of it) in the SPF tree, how hard would it be to detect that sending a packet to a device that is not on the shortest path results in a forwarding loop? Is the lack of OSPF or IS-IS UCLB in Cisco IOS the result of lip service to the standards (at least the OSPF one is way too prescriptive) or a shoddy implementation? What are your thoughts?

Link-state algorithms select the best routes through a two-step process:

1. The topology of the area is analyzed using SPF algorithm, resulting in a shortest-path tree. This tree contains the shortest paths from the current router to any other node (router or transit LAN) in the current area. This step performed with the Shortest Path First (SPF) algorithm.
2. The best routes are selected based on the advertisements from all routers in the area (including inter-area and external routes in case of OSPF). The route selection is a simple distance-vector operation where the router selects the minimum-cost IP prefixes from the set of all advertised IP prefixes.