OSPF was created to solve which problem?

• A. Lack of IPv6 support
• B. Limited hop count
• C. RIP's inability to handle routing in large, diverse networks
• D. Too much overhead in EIGRP

Answer: (C)

OSPF was designed to scale routing to large, complex networks by using a link-state approach and a hierarchical design, rather than the hop-count based method used by RIP. In RIP, routing decisions are made with a distance-vector that counts hops, has a maximum of 15 hops, and updates slowly, which leads to slow convergence and poor behavior in big networks. OSPF, on the other hand, has each router share topology information via link-state advertisements, floods this information to build a complete view of the network, and then runs a shortest-path calculation to determine routes. This enables fast convergence, reduces routing table size through area segmentation (with a backbone), and handles diverse network topologies more effectively. Although IPv6 support exists in OSPF through a later extension, its creation was driven by the need to solve RIP’s scalability and convergence issues in large networks rather than IPv6 itself. EIGRP-related concerns aren’t the impetus for OSPF’s development.