This field identifies the piece of the routing domain that is being described by the advertisement. Depending on the advertisement's LS type, the Link State ID takes on the values listed in Table 16.
Actually, for Type 3 summary link (LS type = 3) advertisements and AS external link (LS type = 5) advertisements, the Link State ID may additionally have one or more of the destination network's "host" bits set. For example, when originating an AS external link for the network 10.0.0.0 with mask of 255.0.0.0, the Link State ID can be set to anything in the range 10.0.0.0 through 10.255.255.255 inclusive (although 10.0.0.0 should be used whenever possible). The freedom to set certain host bits allows a router to originate separate advertisements for two networks having the same address but different masks. See Appendix F for details.
LS Type Advertisement description
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1 These are the router links
advertisements. They describe the
collected states of the router's
interfaces. For more information,
consult Section 12.4.1.
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2 These are the network links
advertisements. They describe the set
of routers attached to the network. For
more information, consult
Section 12.4.2.
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3 or 4 These are the summary link
advertisements. They describe
inter-area routes, and enable the
condensation of routing information at
area borders. Originated by area border
routers, the Type 3 advertisements
describe routes to networks while the
Type 4 advertisements describe routes to
AS boundary routers.
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5 These are the AS external link
advertisements. Originated by AS
boundary routers, they describe routes
to destinations external to the
Autonomous System. A default route for
the Autonomous System can also be
described by an AS external link
advertisement.
Table 15: OSPF link state advertisements.
LS Type Link State ID
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1 The originating router's Router ID.
2 The IP interface address of the
network's Designated Router.
3 The destination network's IP address.
4 The Router ID of the described AS
boundary router.
5 The destination network's IP address.
Table 16: The advertisement's Link State ID.
When the link state advertisement is describing a network (LS type = 2, 3 or 5), the network's IP address is easily derived by masking the Link State ID with the network/subnet mask contained in the body of the link state advertisement. When the link state advertisement is describing a router (LS type = 1 or 4), the Link State ID is always the described router's OSPF Router ID.
When an AS external advertisement (LS Type = 5) is describing a default route, its Link State ID is set to DefaultDestination (0.0.0.0).