Routing protocol

A routing protocol specifies how routers communicate with each other, disseminating information that enables them to select routes between any two nodes on a computer network. Routing algorithms determine the specific choice of route. Each router has a priori knowledge only of networks attached to it directly. A routing protocol shares this information first among immediate neighbors, and then throughout the network. This way, routers gain knowledge of the topology of the network.

Although there are many types of routing protocols, three major classes are in widespread use on IP networks:

Exterior gateway protocols should not be confused with Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP), an obsolete routing protocol.

Many routing protocols are defined in documents called RFCs.[1][2][3][4]

Some versions of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) networking model distinguish routing protocols in a special sublayer of the Network Layer (Layer 3).

The specific characteristics of routing protocols include the manner in which they avoid routing loops, the manner in which they select preferred routes, using information about hop costs, the time they require to reach routing convergence, their scalability, and other factors.

OSI layer designation

Routing protocols, according to the OSI routing framework, are layer management protocols for the network layer, regardless of their transport mechanism:

Interior gateway protocols

Interior gateway protocols (IGPs) exchange routing information within a single routing domain. Examples of IGPs include:

Exterior gateway protocols

Exterior gateway protocols exchange routing information between autonomous systems. Examples include:

Routing software

Many software implementations exist for most of the common routing protocols. Examples of open-source applications are Bird Internet routing daemon, Quagga, GNU Zebra, OpenBGPD, OpenOSPFD, and XORP.

Routed protocols

Some network certification courses distinguish between routing protocols and routed protocols. A routed protocol is used to deliver application traffic. It provides appropriate addressing information in its Internet Layer (Network Layer) addressing to allow a packet to be forwarded from one network to another.

Examples of routed protocols are the Internet Protocol (IP) and Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX).

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Cisco no longer supports the proprietary IGRP protocol. The EIGRP implementation accepts IGRP configuration commands, but the internals of IGRP and EIGRP are different.

References

  1. ↑ INTERNET PROTOCOL, RFC 791, J Postel, September 1981.
  2. ↑ BROADCASTING INTERNET DATAGRAMS IN THE PRESENCE OF SUBNETS, RFC 922, Jeffrey Mogul, October 1984
  3. ↑ Towards Requirements for IP Routers, RFC 1716, P. Almquist, November 1994
  4. ↑ Requirements for IP Version 4 Routers, RFC 1812, F. Baker,June 1995

Further reading

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