RFC 9377 · EXPERIMENTAL · 2023

IS-IS Flood Reflection

Overview

RFC 9377, “IS-IS Flood Reflection”, is an Experimental document published in April 2023 by T. Przygienda, C. Bowers, Y. Lee, A. Sharma, R. White. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.

Abstract

This document describes a backward-compatible, optional IS-IS extension that allows the creation of IS-IS flood reflection topologies. Flood reflection permits topologies in which IS-IS Level 1 (L1) areas provide transit-forwarding for IS-IS Level 2 (L2) areas using all available L1 nodes internally. It accomplishes this by creating L2 flood reflection adjacencies within each L1 area. Those adjacencies are used to flood L2 Link State Protocol Data Units (LSPs) and are used in the L2 Shortest Path First (SPF) computation. However, they are not ordinarily utilized for forwarding within the flood reflection cluster. This arrangement gives the L2 topology significantly better scaling properties than prevalently used flat designs. As an additional benefit, only those routers directly participating in flood reflection are required to support the feature. This allows for incremental deployment of scalable L1 transit areas in an existing, previously flat network design, without the necessity of upgrading all routers in the network.

Abstract as published in the RFC, via rfc-editor.org.

What “Experimental” means

Describes a specification that is part of a research or development effort, published so the community can gain experience with it.

Read this RFC

The canonical text of RFC 9377 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in HTML,TXT,PDF,XML.

Other RFCs from 2023

Who Is Online

In total there are 72 users online: 0 registered, 66 guests and 6 bots.

Most users ever online was 1,226 on 13 Jun 2026, 3:56 am.

Bots: AhrefsBot Applebot Googlebot Other Bot Other Crawler SemrushBot

Users active in the past 15 minutes. Total registered members: 354