31.4.2 Interface to Network Dynamics and Multicast

This section describes the methods applied in unicast routing to respond to changes in the topology. The complete sequence of actions that cause the changes in the topology, and fire the appropriate actions is described in a different section. The response to topology changes falls into two categories: actions taken by individual agents at each of the nodes, and actions to be taken globally for the entire protocol.

Detailed routing protocols such as the DV implementation require actions to be performed by individual protocol agents at the affected nodes. Centralized routing protocols such as static and session routing fall into the latter category exclusively. Detailed routing protocols could use such techniques to gather statistics related to the operation of the routing protocol; however, no such code is currently implemented in ns.