History
What is believed to be the first adaptive routing network of computers, using link-state routing as its heart, was designed and implemented during 1976-77 by a team from Plessey Radar led by Bernard J Harris; the project was for "Wavell" - a system of computer command and control for the British Army.
The first link-state routing concept was published in 1979 by John M. McQuillan (then at Bolt, Beranek and Newman) as a mechanism that would calculate routes more quickly when network conditions changed, and thus lead to more stable routing.
Later work at BBN Technologies showed how to use the link-state technique in a hierarchical system, i.e. one in which the network was divided into areas, so that each switching node does not need a map of the entire network, only the area(s) in which it is included.
The technique was later adapted for use in the contemporary link-state routing protocols IS-IS and OSPF. Cisco literature refers to EIGRP as a "hybrid" protocol, despite the fact it distributes routing tables instead of topology maps. However, it does synchronize routing tables at start up as OSPF does, and sends specific updates only when topology changes occur.
In 2004 Radia Perlman proposed using link-state routing for Layer 2 frame forwarding with devices called Routing Bridges or Rbridges. The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the TRILL protocol to accomplish this.
More recently, this hierarchical technique was applied to wireless mesh networks using the optimized link state routing protocol. Where a connection can have varying quality, the quality of a connection can be used to select better connections. This is used in some routing protocols that use radio frequency transmission.
In 2012 the IEEE completed and approved the standardization of the use of IS-IS to control Ethernet forwarding with IEEE 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).
Read more about this topic: Link-state Routing Protocol
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