Written by the creator of the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) protocol, this book demonstrates the protocol in action with a complete OSPF implementation. It shows how the protocol's theory is realized in a real-time distributed software system, reveals many of the finer points of OSPF, and offers experienced-based optimization and porting techniques. The implementation described and examined in this book is written in C++ and designed with porting in mind. The book details the software architecture of the implementation and describes in-depth key OSPF functions, illustrated by numerous code samples. It also includes a guide to porting OSPF software to different environments, with an explanation of the software layer between the OSPF implementation and the operating system. In addition, two sample ports are included—a routing daemon for Linux and an OSPF routing simulator for Linux and Windows.