This should help you out.
LSA type 3. Now this type is a bit tricky and brings in a lot of confusion. It is generated by an ABR to tell the routers in one area about the network in another area. Essentially, the router “pretends” like all the “foreign” networks are attached to it. From a topological perspective, this is true, because areas never know anything about another area’s topology – this information is lost when crossing the area boundaries. How are Type 3 LSAs generated? First of all, keep in mind that OSPF generates those by walking the main routing table, not the LSDB. This is per RFC 2328 clause 12.4.3 and in full accordance with distance-vector protocol behavior. Every route in the table has additional OSPF information associated with it, such as area number, route-type (intra-area, inter-area, external) next hop, and so on.
1) The ABR goes over the network reachability information in the RIB associated with intra-are routes for the particular area X and summarizes them honoring the area X range command settings. This results in Type-3 LSAs being generated and advertised into all other areas. Pay attention to the following important things:
1.1) Only intra-area routes are summarized. You cannot summarize inter-ara routes installed by processing type-3 LSAs learned from Area 0. Those will generate new type-3 LSAs in the ABR and will propagated them into non-backbone areas unmodified.
1.2) The intra-area routes are summarized PRIOR to applying the distribute-list filter and blocking the routes from entering the RIB. This is needed to allow for generation of a summary route, even if you don’t want the specific prefixes in the local RIB and calculate the correct metric if needed. Thus, even though OSPF walks over the RIB to gather the intra-area prefixes for summarization, it does so BEFORE applying the filter. The ultimate goal is making summarization the highest priority task, in order to increase network stability.
1.3) The OSPF metric for the summarized route is taken as the minimal among all intra-area routes. To ensure better routing stability, it is usually recommended setting the metric manually, to prevent LSA re-flooding in case some component route flaps and affects the summary metric.
2) Now, for dealing with the inter-area routes learned by the ARB, first of all, keep in mind that an ABR ONLY accepts and processes type-3 LSAs received from the backbone area. This is the well-know loop prevention mechanism built into OSPF, since OSPF behaves as a distance-vector protocol when dealing with inter-area routing information. This is a short description of how an ABR processes type-3 LSAs:
2.1) Ignore the type-3 LSA if it is NOT from the backbone area (prevents routing loops).
2.2) Walk over the inter-area routes learned via Area 0 in the RIB and generate respective type-3 LSAs which are flooded into the attached non-backbone areas. Thus, LSAs are effectively being re-generated based on the RIB contents.
You can see all of this through the following links.
http://blog.ine.com/2009/08/17/ospf-route-filtering-demystified/
