Dynamic Routing Protocol
Dynamic routing protocols, as their name suggests, are used to dynamically exchange routing
information between routers. Their implementation allows network topologies to dynamically adjust
to changing network conditions, and to ensure that efficient and redundant routing continues in
spite of any changes. In addition, they are invaluable to the management, administration, and
configuration of networks as relatively low administrative overhead is required to configure highly
complex routing scenarios. Compared to statically configuring routing in topology, the
implementation of dynamic routing protocols vastly improves the scalability of networks.
The first dynamic routing protocol was the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP), introduced in 1982 by
Eric C. Rosen. Since then, many more advanced protocols have been developed and have matured
over the years, protocols that we will cover extensively in this series of articles.
Dynamic Routing
Dynamic routing is a mechanism through which routing information is exchanged between routers to
determine the optimal path between network devices. A routing protocol is used to identify and
announce network paths.
Dynamic routing protocols were designed to address the previously mentioned shortcomings of
static routing such as the need for human involvement to route traffic around failures, the human
mistakes made when typing route information, and the scaling limit of the few routes one person
can track in a text file. These benefits come at the expense of requiring significant computing power
in the routers, and the need for training network administrators who specialize in taming routing
algorithms.
Routing Protocol Fundamentals
Dynamic routing involves the use of routing protocols that exchange routing information between
routing devices. Routing protocols perform these functions:
● Discovery of remote networks
● Best path calculation to remote networks
● Updating the routing table
● Recalculating a new best path in the case of failure of the current best path
There is less administrative overhead when using routing protocols than static routing. However,
running a routing protocol requires extra CPU and memory resources.
Types of Routing Protocols
The dynamic routing protocols fall into one of two categories:
Interior gateway protocols (IGPs)
Exterior Gateway Protocols (EGPs)
Interior gateway protocol (IGPs): an interior gateway protocol operates within a particular
Autonomous System (AS). RIP, EIGRP and OSPF are IGP type protocols.
Exterior Gateway Protocols (EGPs): exterior gateway protocol operates between ASes. An
autonomous system is a set of routers under a common administration with common routing
policies. BGP is EGP type protocol.
Interior gateway protocols can be further categorized into distance vector protocols and link-state
protocols based on their operation:
● A router using a distance vector routing protocol is unaware of the network topology. It
knows only about its directly connected networks and the remote networks it can reach via
its neighbors.
● Link-state protocols are more complex: routers using them are aware of the network
topology.
The only exterior gateway protocol used today is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is the de-
facto standard inter-domain routing protocol used in the Internet. BGP is what is known as a path-
vector protocol. Its predecessor, EGP is no longer in use, and is considered obsolete.
The most commonly used routing protocols are shown in the table below.
Interior or Exterior Distance Vector or Link-
Protocol Name Gateway Protocol? State Protocol?
Routing Information Protocol (RIPv2) Interior Distance Vector
Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol
(EIGRP) Interior Distance Vector
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) Interior Link-State
Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-
IS) Interior Link-State
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Exterior Path-Vector
RIPv2 and EIGRP had predecessors that are no longer supported in current software releases.
Metrics
As mentioned before, the primary purpose of a routing protocol is to find the best path to a
destination. It is not unusual for a router to have multiple paths to a destination learned through a
single routing protocol, so the paths need to be compared to find the best path.
When the source of information for multiple paths is the same — all the paths are known to the
router through the same routing protocol — the router uses the metrics calculated by the routing
protocol to find the best path.
Different routing protocols use different ways to calculate metrics. The metric calculated by one
routing protocol cannot be compared to the metric calculated by another. Different routing protocols
might not choose the same best path because of how they calculate their metrics.
Some protocols use just a single variable to calculate metrics, while others may use a combination of
several. For instance, RIPv2, which is a distance-vector routing protocol, uses as a metric the hop
count, which is how many routers exist between the router and the remote network.
In contrast, OSPF, which is a link-state routing protocol, uses cost as a metric, which, by default, is
tied to the bandwidth of the interface through which the remote destination can be reached.
Furthermore, unlike IGPs, BGP exchanges routing and reachability information between ASes. The
best path is determined based on a series of attributes that are examined, and the best path is
denoted as a list of ASes that must be traversed to reach the intended destination network.
The table below shows the various metrics used by routing protocols which will be covered in this
course.
Routing protocol Metric Description
The number of routers between the source and
RIPv1 Hop count
destination network.
The number of routers between the source and
RIPv2 Hop count
destination network.
A combination of several values used to
EIGRP Composite metric determine the best path. The composite metric
will be discussed in the chapter on EIGRP.
The bandwith or cost configured from the router
OSPFv2 Cost
to the destination network
The bandwith or cost configured from the router
OSPFv3 Cost
to the destination network
Administrative Distance
We just saw that routers decide which is the best path when choosing among several paths learned
from the same routing protocol. However, what happens when the router has two paths, each from
a different routing protocol? The router cannot use a metric to compare the two routes because
each routing protocol calculates the metric differently.
In this case, the router uses administrative distance (AD) to determine which is the best path. The
AD can be seen as the trustiness of the source of information, and a lower value is a better value. It
ranges from 0 and 255, with 0 being for the connected routes and 255 for unreachable routes. Each
vendor has values assigned to the routing protocols, which might or might not be identical to the
values assigned by other vendors.
The table below shows the various administrative distances for the routing protocols which will be
covered in this course.
Routing Protocol Administrative Distance
RIP 120
OSPF 110
EIGRP 90
Static routes 1
Connected Interface 0
