OSPF belongs to which category of routing protocols?

• A. Distance-vector
• B. Link-State
• C. Path-Vector
• D. Hybrid

Answer: (B)

OSPF is a link-state routing protocol. In this approach, each router builds a complete view of the network topology by exchanging link-state advertisements and reliably flooding them to all routers in the area. With that full topology, every router runs a shortest-path algorithm (Dijkstra) to compute the best paths. OSPF also uses area-based hierarchy to scale and achieve faster convergence when changes occur. This differs from distance-vector protocols, which share routing tables with neighbors and use hop count as the metric, and from path-vector protocols like BGP that carry path information between autonomous systems. Hybrid protocols blend features of both. So, the category OSPF belongs to is link-state.