The two practical OSPF convergence improvements are enabling Bidirectional Forwarding Detection and tuning OSPF timers and throttling behavior. Cisco describes BFD as a protocol designed to provide fast forwarding-path failure detection across media, encapsulations, topologies, and routing protocols. With OSPF, BFD allows a neighbor failure to be detected rapidly without depending only on the OSPF dead interval.
OSPF parameters can also be tuned, including SPF scheduling, LSA generation, and LSA arrival throttling, so the control plane reacts quickly but not recklessly during instability. Merging all areas into one backbone area is not a convergence improvement; it usually increases the size of the link-state database and the impact of topology changes. Making every nonbackbone area stub may reduce external LSA scope, but it is not universally valid and does not directly solve failure detection. Spanning the same IP network across multiple OSPF areas is a poor design and can create operational ambiguity. Therefore, BFD plus careful OSPF parameter tuning are the appropriate convergence-focused design actions.