Routing Protocol Basics

Hop count
• Hop is one portion of path b/w source and destination. Each time
packets are passed to the next network device a hop occur.
• Metrics
• If multiple routes exists to a given destination NW-ID, the metric is
used to decide which route is to be taken.
• The route with the lowest metric is the preferred route
• Are cost values used by routers to determined the best path
destination network.
• RIP uses the next hop to determine the best path through the
network.
• The path with the fewest number of routed hops is considered the
best path.
• OSPF metric is cost.
• OSPF use bandwidth as the metric.
• More the bandwidth fast will be the interface
Administrative Distances
• The administrative distance (AD) is used to rate the trustworthiness of
routing information received on a router from a neighbor router.
• An administrative distance is an integer from 0 to 255, where 0 is the
most trusted and 255 means no traffic will be passed via this route.
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• If a router receives two updates listing the same remote network, the
first thing the router checks is the AD.
• If one of the advertised routes has a lower AD than the other, then
the route with the lowest AD will be chosen and placed in the routing
table.
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• If both advertised routes to the same network have the same AD,
then routing protocol metrics like hop count and/or the bandwidth of
the lines will be used to find the best path to the remote network.
• The advertised route with the lowest metric will be placed in the
routing table, but if both advertised routes have the same AD as well
as the same metrics, then the routing protocol will load-balance to
the remote network, meaning the protocol will send data down each
link.
Routing Protocols
• There are three classes of routing protocols:
Distance vector
• The distance-vector protocols in use today find the best path to a
remote network by judging distance.
• In RIP routing, each instance where a packet goes through a router is
called a hop, and the route with the least number of hops to the
network will be chosen as the best one.
• RIP is a distance-vector routing protocol and periodically sends out
the entire routing table to directly connected neighbors.
Link state
• In link-state protocols, also called shortest-path-first protocols, the
routers each create three separate tables.
• One of these tables
1. keeps track of directly attached neighbors,
2. One determines the topology of the entire internetwork,
3. And one is used as the routing table.
• Link-state routers know more about the internetwork than any
distance-vector routing protocol ever could.
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• OSPF is an IP routing protocol that’s completely link-state.
• Link State Protocols send updates containing the state of their own
links to all other directly connected routers on the network.
• This is then propagated to their neighbors.
Hybrid
• Hybrid protocols use aspects of both distance-vector and link-state
protocols, and EIGRP is a great example—even though Cisco typically
just calls EIGRP an advanced distance-vector routing protocol!
• There’s no set of rules to follow that dictate exactly how to broadly
configure routing protocols for every situation.
• It’s a task that really must be undertaken on a case-by-case basis, with
an eye on specific requirements of each one.
• If you understand how the different routing protocols work, you can
make good, solid decisions that will solidly meet the individual needs
of any business!
Routing Information Protocol (RIP)
• Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a true distance-vector routing
protocol.
• RIP sends the complete routing table out of all active interfaces every
30 seconds.
• It relies on hop count to determine the best way to a remote network,
but it has a maximum allowable hop count of 15 by default, so a
destination of 16 would be considered unreachable.
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• RIP works okay in very small networks, but it’s super inefficient on
large networks with slow WAN links or on networks with a large
number of routers installed.
• RIP version 1 uses only classful routing, which means that all devices
in the network must use the same subnet mask.
• This is because RIP version 1 doesn’t send updates with subnet mask
information in tow.
• RIP version 2 provides something called prefix routing and does send
subnet mask information with its route updates.
• This is called classless routing.
Configuring RIP Routing
• To configure RIP routing, just turn on the protocol with the
• #router rip command
• and tell the RIP routing protocol the networks to advertise.
• Remember that with static routing, we always configured remote
networks and never typed a route to our directly connected
networks?
• Dynamic routing is carried out the complete opposite way.
• You would never type a remote network under your routing protocol
—only enter your directly connected networks!
• Corp(config-router)#passive-interface FastEthernet 0/0
• This command will stop RIP updates from being propagated out of
FastEthernet interface 0/0, but this can still receive RIP updates.
Exercise Configure RIP Protocol