Please Whitelist This Site? I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. I don't want to go to a pay-only model like some sites, but when more and more people block ads, I end up working for free. And I have a family to support, just like you. :) If you like The TCP/IP Guide, please consider the download version. It's priced very economically and you can read all of it in a convenient format without ads. If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add the site to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on tcpipguide.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@||tcpipguide.com^$document". Then just click OK. Thanks for your understanding! Sincerely, Charles Kozierok Author and Publisher, The TCP/IP Guide

NOTE: Using software to mass-download the site degrades the server and is prohibited. If you want to read The TCP/IP Guide offline, please consider licensing it. Thank you.

The TCP/IP Guide  9  TCP/IP Lower-Layer (Interface, Internet and Transport) Protocols (OSI Layers 2, 3 and 4)       9  TCP/IP Internet Layer (OSI Network Layer) Protocols            9  TCP/IP Routing Protocols (Gateway Protocols)                 9  TCP/IP Interior Routing Protocols (RIP, OSPF, GGP, HELLO, IGRP, EIGRP)                      9  TCP/IP Routing Information Protocol (RIP, RIP-2 and RIPng)                           9  RIP Fundamentals and General Operation

RIP Overview, History, Standards and Versions 1 2 3 RIP General Operation, Messaging and Timers

As I mentioned in the overview topic on TCP/IP routing protocols, one of the defining characteristics of any routing protocol is the algorithm it uses for determining routes. RIP falls into the class of protocols that use a distance-vector or Bellman-Ford routing algorithm. To help you better understand exactly how RIP determines routes, I will now discuss the specific implementation of the algorithm for RIP and provide an example so you can see exactly how RIP determines routes and propagates information across a network.

The job of RIP, like any routing protocol, is to provide a mechanism for exchanging information about routes so routers can keep their routing tables up to date. Each router in an RIP internetwork keeps track in its routing table of all networks (and possibly individual hosts) in the internetwork. For each network or host, the device includes a variety of information, of which the following are the most important:

• The address of the network or host.
  
  
• The distance from that router to the network or host.
  
  
• The first hop for the route: the device to which datagrams must first be sent to eventually get to the network or host.

In theory, the distance metric can be any assessment of cost, but in RIP, distance is measured in hops. As you probably already know, in TCP/IP vernacular, a datagram makes a hop when it passes through a router. Thus, the RIP distance between a router and a network measures the number of routers that the datagram must pass through to get to the network. If a router connects to a network directly, then the distance is 1 hop. If it goes through a single router, the distance is 2 hops, and so on. In RIP, a maximum of 15 hops are allowed for any network or host. The value 16 is defined as infinity, so an entry with 16 in it means “this network or host is not reachable”.

On a regular basis, each router running RIP will send out its routing table entries to provide information to other routers about the networks and hosts it knows how to reach. Any routers on the same network as the one sending out this information will be able to update their own tables based on the information they receive. Any router that receives a message from another router on the same network saying it can reach network X at a cost of N, knows it can reach network X at a cost of N+1 by sending to the router it received the message from.

RIP Overview, History, Standards and Versions 1 2 3 RIP General Operation, Messaging and Timers