Web Management Guide-R06

Chapter 19 | Unicast Routing
Configuring the Routing Information Protocol
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Configuring the Routing Information Protocol
The RIP protocol is the most widely used routing protocol. The RIP protocol uses a
distance-vector-based approach to routing. Routes are determined on the basis of
minimizing the distance vector, or hop count, which serves as a rough estimate of
transmission cost. Each router broadcasts its advertisement every 30 seconds,
together with any updates to its routing table. This allows all routers on the
network to learn consistent tables of next hop links which lead to relevant subnets.
Figure 466: Configuring RIP
Command Usage
◆ Just as Layer 2 switches use the Spanning Tree Algorithm to prevent loops,
routers also use methods for preventing loops that would cause endless
retransmission of
data traffic. RIP utilizes the following three methods to
prevent loops from occurring:
■
Split horizon – Never propagate routes back to an interface port from
which they have been acquired.
■
Poison reverse – Propagate routes back to an interface port from which
they have been acquired, but set the distance-vector metrics to infinity.
(This provides faster convergence.)
■
Triggered updates – Whenever a route gets changed, broadcast an update
message
after waiting for a short random delay, but without waiting for the
periodic cycle.
◆ RIP-2 is a compatible upgrade to RIP. RIP-2 adds useful capabilities for plain text
authentication, multiple independent RIP domains, variable length subnet
masks, and multicast transmissions for route advertising (RFC 1723).
◆ There are several serious problems with RIP that you should consider. First of all,
RIP (version 1) has no knowledge of subnets, both RIP versions can take a long
time to converge on a new route after the failure of a link or router during
which time routing loops may occur, and its small hop count limitation of 15
restricts its use to smaller networks. Moreover, RIP (version 1) wastes valuable
network bandwidth by propagating routing information via broadcasts; it also
considers too few network variables to make the best routing decision.
A
1
3
6
4
2
5
BC
DE
A
A
B
C
D
Link Cost
0
E
1
1
3
1
0
1
2
1
2
Cost = 1 for all links
Routing table for node A