Evaluation of Secured and Unsecured OSPF Routing Protocols: A Simulated Experiment

Routing protocols are essential for network efficacy and dependability. They facilitate autonomous path discovery, failure adaptation by identifying alternative routes, traffic load balancing over numerous paths, and minimisation of administrator workload. This study aimed to evaluate the operational efficacy of unsecured OSPF compared to secured OSPF in a regulated network environment. This study utilised a quantitative experimental design employing network modelling. Two separate network scenarios are implemented in Cisco Packet Tracer, both employing identical physical and logical topologies. The specific performance metrics used were ping, traceroute and FTP. The results indicated that the secured OSPF network has somewhat elevated processing overhead, particularly noticeable in traceroute and small-file FTP transfers. Nevertheless, this overhead is little and does not significantly impede network performance. The secured network demonstrates competitive and, at times, superior performance for prolonged data transfers. The findings demonstrate that the security benefits of OSPF authentication outweigh the negligible performance costs, making secured OSPF a viable and recommended option for enterprise and research networks where data integrity and routing reliability are critical