Cisco Discovery Protocol

Cisco Discovery Protocol is more commonly known by the term CDP in the networking world. This protocol was specifically designed and introduced by the Cisco Systems themselves for their routers and other devices that are used in the networking. It is a data link layer network protocol. The main role of the protocol is that it is used by the device present in the network to gather information and addresses of the different devices which are present in its neighborhood. Along with this task, the protocol is also used to discover the platform of those neighboring devices.The third use of this protocol is that, it can also be used to show the information about the interfaces that a person’s router uses.

This protocol can run on all the appliances or devices made by the Cisco Systems without any problem, the devices are routers, switches, bridges, access servers and other networking devices exclusively made by the Cisco Systems. CDP unlike the other protocols that perform the same task is a media and protocol independent protocol. Till date only two version of this CDP has been released in the market, CDP version 1 or CDPv1 and CDP version 2 or CDPv2.

The information that comes back to the router or the device from which the CDP message was sent varies greatly according to the type of the device it is coming from and the version of the operating system that the device is using. The information that comes from a device may hold more than just the address of that device, like it may also include the version, and type of the Operating system, information about all the protocols that the device is using and along with that, the device, type and model information might also be present in the same message or announcement made by the CDP to the source device about its neighboring device.