RIP

BACKGROUND:

This is a continuation of the routing discussion, but now we will be focusing on dynamic routing which uses the Routing Information Protocol(RIP). RIP measures the distance from source to destination by counting the number of hops(routers or gateways) that the packets must travel over. RIP sets a maximum of 15 hops and considers any larger number of hops unreachable. RIP's real advantage is that if there are multiple possible paths to a particular destination and the appropriate entries exist in the routing table, it will choose the shortest route. Like me, RIP is all about the path of least resistance. RIP uses an update interval which broadcasts its routing table over UDP port 520 after a specified period of time. Here is how it works...

OK...Router 1 and router 2 would broadcast their routing tables to each other every x seconds depending on what the update interval is set to. Each router would then add any new routes to its table. If a route already exists then the router would see if the new route has less hops then the one it currently has stored.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

The Microsoft text claims that RIP is best used on smaller networks. This is because larger networks can have a crap-load of entries in their routing table. Due to the fact that RIP packets can be a maximum of 512 bytes, larger tables would have to be sent as multiple packets which can bog down the network.