Routing Information Protocol

The term Routing Information Protocol is more common in the networking world of today by the name of RIP. It is one of the most extensively used interior gateway protocol or IGP in the networking world, by different administrators of their network to bring about some specific function or to fulfill some objective. This Routing information protocol was defined in the RFC 1058. The main role of this protocol was to specify that how the routers present in the network would exchange their routing table information with one another and other devices that require information from the routing table.

When the routing information protocol is implemented in a network then the routers in that network periodically change their entire routing table in search of better and shorter paths for the data packets, however, the method adopted by the RIP or one can say that the algorithm that this routing information protocol works on is inefficient and causes important information loss, so it is slowly being replaced by another routing protocol, which performs this job more efficiently and in a better way and the name of that protocol is OSPF or Open Shortest Path First. As compared to the routing information protocol, this OSPF is relatively a newer technology; therefore it was designed to overcome the short comings of this RIP.

Since the RIP was first introduced, three versions of this technology had been made. They are named Version 1, version 2 and RIPng. The version 1 was the first and the original version which was also defined in the RFC 1058. This version made use of classful routing. Then came the version 2 which was developed in 1993, but was finally standardized in 1998. The third version, named as RIPng, is the next generation technology and is defined in the RFC 2080. This version is the extension to the version 2 to provide support for IPv6.