Routing Protocol

Routing protocol is one of the most important protocols in the networking world. Without this protocol, a network would be unable to function properly as they do today, and along with that the routers would be utterly useless as these routers make use of this protocol to bring about their function. A routing protocol basically is a protocol that specifies that how the routers communicate with the other routers present in the network, and then allows the routers to decide and choose upon the best path for the data packets to flow through between any two nodes in the computer network, however, the choice of the best path is done by the routing algorithms.

A router that is present in a network, has only the information about the network it is attached with, and this routing protocol first brings about the task of distributing this information to the routers immediate neighbors and then spread this information throughout the network, so that all the routers present are updated and can decide upon the path for the flow of the data packets. Moreover, by this procedure a router is able to get the knowledge about the topology of the network.

In an OSI model there are seven different layers, however, the term routing protocol would specifically refer to the layer 3 of this model. There are many types of routing protocol present in the networking world, released and being used by different companies and vendors, however, the three major routing protocols are Interior Gateway Routing, via the link state routing protocols. The example of this is OSPF and IS-IS. The second type is Interior Gateway Routing via path vector or distance vector protocols, examples of which are RIP, IGRP and EIGRP. Then the third type of routing protocol is Exterior Gateway Protocol, which is used by the internet.