Simulation Based EIGRP over OSPF Performance Analysis

Routing protocol is taking a vital role in the modern communication networks. A routing protocol is a protocol which is responsible to determine how routers communicate with each other and forward the packets through the optimal path to travel from a source node to a destination node. Among the routing protocols, Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) are the pre-eminent routing protocols. EIGRP is a Cisco proprietary distance-vector protocol based on Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL). On the other hand, OSPF is a link-state interior gateway protocol based on Dijkstra algorithm (Shortest Path First Algorithm). In the context of routing protocol performance, each of them has different architecture, adaptability, route processing delays and convergence capabilities. This thesis presents a simulation based comparative performance analysis between OSPF and EIGRP for real time applications by using OPNET. In order to evaluate OSPF and EIGRP’s performance, we have designed three network models where 1 st , 2 nd and 3 rd network model are configured respectively with OSPF, EIGRP and combination of EIGRP and OSPF. Our evaluation of proposed routing protocols is performed based on the quantitative metrics such as Convergence Time, Jitter, End-to-End delay, Throughput and Packet Loss through the simulated network models. The evaluation results show that EIGRP routing protocol provides a better performance than OSPF routing protocol for real time applications.