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RIP Overview, History, Standards and Versions
(Page 2 of 3)
RIP Operational Overview, Advantages and Limitations
On a regular basis, each router in
the internetwork sends out its routing table in a special message on
each of the networks to which it is connected, using UDP.
Other routers receive these tables and use them to update their own
tables. This is done by taking each of the routes they receive and adding
an extra hop. For example, if router A receives an indication
from router B that network N1 is 4 hops away, then since
router A and router B are adjacent, the distance from
router A to N1 is 5. After a router updates its tables,
it in turn sends out this information to other routers on its local
networks. Over time, routing distance information for all networks propagates
over the entire internetwork.
RIP is straight-forward in operation,
easy to implement, and undemanding of router processing power, which
makes it attractive especially in smaller autonomous systems. There
are, however, some important limitations that arise due to the simplicity
of the protocol. For starters, hops are often not the best metric to
use in selecting routes. There are also a number of problems that arise
with the algorithm itself. These include slow convergence (delays in
having all routers agree on the same routing information) and problems
dealing with network link failures.
RIP includes several special features
to resolve some of these issues, but others are inherent limitations
of the protocol. For example, RIP only supports a maximum of 15 hops
between destinations, making it unsuitable for very large autonomous
systems, and this cannot be changed.
 Key Concept: The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is one of the oldest and most popular interior routing protocols. It uses a distance-vector algorithm with each router maintaining a table indicating how to reach various networks in the autonomous system and the distance to it in hops. RIP is popular because it is well-established and simple, but has a number of important limitations.
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