<![CDATA[Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) multi-area networks at medium to large scales face the problem of Link State Database (LSDB) bloat caused by uncontrolled Link State Advertisement (LSA) propagation, particularly when each subnet is individually advertised by the Area Border Router (ABR) across all network areas. This condition increases memory consumption, the computational load of the Shortest Path First (SPF) algorithm, and routing convergence delays. This study aims to quantitatively analyze the impact of applying route summarization on the ABR regarding the number of LSAs per type, LSDB size, routing table entries, convergence time, and CPU and memory utilization of MikroTik RouterOS CHR devices in an OSPF multi-area environment. The method employed is quantitative experimental with two controlled scenarios: without route summarization as a baseline and with route summarization on the ABR as the treatment condition. The topology was built on the GNS3 simulation platform using 12 MikroTik CHR routers distributed across three areas with 24 active subnets and 1,000 dummy prefixes. Results show that route summarization reduced Type-3 LSAs by 99.71%, decreased LSDB size by 99.32%, reduced routing table entries by 99.22%, lowered peak ABR CPU usage from 11.33% to 8.33%, and achieved perfect fault isolation on the Area 0 control plane with an average convergence time of 0.2 ms compared to 1,023 ms in the baseline condition. This study contributes practical guidelines for network administrators to optimize router memory utilization and accelerate convergence in multi-area network architectures.]]>
