TERM PAPER

OF

CSE-306

TOPIC-: RIP (ROUTING PROTOCOL)

Submitted to:- Submitted by:-

MISS. SHIFALI ARORA AVINASH KUMAR

Roll no.-E1803B28

Reg.Id:-10801371

B-tech(CSE)-IntgMBA
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It acknowledges all the contributors involved

in the preparation of this project. Including me, there is a hand of my
teachers, some books and internet. I express most gratitude to my subject
teacher MISS. SHIFALI ARORA, who guided me in the right
direction. The guidelines provided by her helped me a lot in completing
the assignment.
The books and websites I consulted helped me to describe
each and every point mentioned in this project. Help of original
creativity and illustration had taken and I have explained each and every
aspect of the project precisely.
At last it acknowledges all the members who are
involved in the preparation of this project.
 CONTENT
 INTRODUCTION

 HISTORY

 TECHNICAL DETAIL

 VERSIONS

 ROUTING UPDATE

 RIP ROUTING METRIC

 RIP STABILITY FEATURES

 RIP TIMER

 PACKETS FORMAT

 DISTANCE ROUTING PROTOCOL

 INTERIOR GATEWAY PROTOCOL

INTRODUCTION

Routing Information Protocol

The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a dynamic routing protocol used in local and wide
area networks. As such it is classified as an interior gateway protocol (IGP). It uses the distance-
vector routing algorithm. It was first defined in RFC 1058 (1988). The protocol has since been
extended several times, resulting in RIP Version 2 (RFC 2453). Both versions are still in use
today, however, they are considered to have been made technically obsolete by more advanced
techniques such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and the OSI protocol IS-IS. RIP has also
been adapted for use in IPv6 networks, a standard known as RIPng (RIP next generation),
published in RFC 2080 (1997).

RIP (Routing Information Protocol) is a standard for exchange of routing information among
gateways and hosts. RIP is most useful as an "interior gateway protocol". In a nationwide
network such as the current Internet, there are many routing protocols be used for the whole
network. Rather, the network will be organized as a collection of "autonomous systems". Each
autonomous system will have its own routing technology, which may well be different for
different autonomous systems. The routing protocol used within an autonomous system is
referred to as an interior gateway protocol, or "IGP". A separate protocol is used to interface
among the autonomous systems. The earliest such protocol, still used in the Internet, is "EGP"
(exterior gateway protocol). Such protocols are now usually referred to as inter-AS routing
protocols. Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is designed to work with moderate-size networks
using reasonably homogeneous technology. Thus it is suitable as an Interior Gateway Protocol
(IGP) for many campuses and for regional networks using serial lines whose speeds do not vary
widely. It is not intended for use in more complex environments.

History
The routing algorithm used in RIP, the Bellman-Ford algorithm, was first deployed in a
computer network in 1967, as the initial routing algorithm of the ARPANET.

The earliest version of the specific protocol that became RIP was the Gateway Information
Protocol, part of the PARC Universal Packet internetworking protocol suite, developed at Xerox
Parc. A later version, named the Routing Information Protocol, was part of Xerox Network
Systems.

A version of RIP which supported the Internet Protocol (IP) was later included in the Berkeley
Software Distribution (BSD) of the Unix operating system. It was known as the routed daemon.
Various other vendors would create their own implementations of the routing protocol.
Eventually, RFC 1058 unified the various implementations under a single standard.

Technical details
RIP is a distance-vector routing protocol, which employs the hop count as a routing metric. The
hold down time is 180 seconds. RIP prevents routing loops by implementing a limit on the
number of hops allowed in a path from the source to a destination. The maximum number of
hops allowed for RIP is 15. This hop limit, however, also limits the size of networks that RIP can
support. A hop count of 16 is considered an infinite distance and used to deprecate inaccessible,
inoperable, or otherwise undesirable routes in the selection process.

Originally each RIP router transmitted full updates every 30 seconds. In the early deployments,
routing tables were small enough that the traffic was not significant. As networks grew in size,
however, it became evident there could be a massive traffic burst every 30 seconds, even if the
routers had been initialized at random times. It was thought, as a result of random initialization,
the routing updates would spread out in time, but this was not true in practice. Sally Floyd and
Van Jacobson showed in 1994 that, without slight randomization of the update timer, the timers
synchronized over time and sent their updates at the same time. Modern RIP implementations
introduce deliberate variation into the update timer intervals of each router.

RIP implements the split horizon, route poisoning and holddown mechanisms to prevent
incorrect routing information from being propagated. These are some of the stability features of
RIP. It is also possible to use the so called RIP-MTI algorithm to cope with the count to infinity
problem. With its help, it's possible to detect every possible loop with a very small computation
effort.

In most current networking environments, RIP is not the preferred choice for routing as its time
to converge and scalability are poor compared to EIGRP, OSPF, or IS-IS (the latter two being
link-state routing protocols), and (without RIP-MTI) a hop limit severely limits the size of
network it can be used in. However, it is easy to configure, because RIP does not require any
parameters on a router unlike other protocols.

RIP is implemented on top of the User Datagram Protocol as its transport protocol. It is assigned
the reserved port number 520.

Versions
There are three versions of the Routing Information Protocol: RIPv1, RIPv2, and RIPng.

RIP version 1
The original specification of RIP, defined in RFC 1058, uses classful routing. The periodic
routing updates do not carry subnet information, lacking support for variable length subnet
masks (VLSM). This limitation makes it impossible to have different-sized subnets inside of the
same network class. In other words, all subnets in a network class must have the same size.
There is also no support for router authentication, making RIP vulnerable to various attacks.The
RIP version 1 works when there is only 16 hop counts(0-15).If there is more than 16 hops
between two routers it fails to send data packets to the destination adress.

RIP version 2
Due to the deficiencies of the original RIP specification, RIP version 2 (RIPv2) was developed in
1993and last standardized in 1998. It included the ability to carry subnet information, thus
supporting Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR). To maintain backward compatibility, the
hop count limit of 15 remained. RIPv2 has facilities to fully interoperate with the earlier
specification if all Must Be Zero protocol fields in the RIPv1 messages are properly specified. In
addition, a compatibility switch feature allows fine-grained interoperability adjustments.

In an effort to avoid unnecessary load on hosts that do not participate in routing, RIPv2
multicasts the entire routing table to all adjacent routers at the address 224.0.0.9, as opposed to
RIPv1 which uses broadcast. Unicast addressing is still allowed for special applications.

(MD5) authentication for RIP was introduced in 1997.

RIPv2 is Internet Standard STD-56.

Route tags were also added in RIP version 2. This functionality allows for routes to be
distinguished from internal routes to external redistributed routes from EGP protocols.

Configuration commands: R#router rip v2

RIPng
RIPng (RIP next generation), defined in RFC 2080, is an extension of RIPv2 for support of IPv6,
the next generation Internet Protocol. The main differences between RIPv2 and RIPng are:

Support of IPv6 networking.

While RIPv2 supports RIPv1 updates authentication, RIPng does not. IPv6 routers were, at the
time, supposed to use IPsec for authentication.
RIPv2 allows attaching arbitrary tags to routes, RIPng does not;

RIPv2 encodes the next-hop into each route entries, RIPng requires specific encoding of the next
hop for a set of route entries.

Limitations
Without using RIP-MTI, Hop count can not exceed 15, in case if it exceeds it will be considered
invalid.Most RIP networks are flat. There is no concept of areas or boundaries in RIP
networks.Variable Length Subnet Masks were not supported by RIP version 1.Without using
RIP-MTI, RIP has slow convergence and count to infinity problems.

Implementations
routed, included in most BSD Unix systemsRouting and Remote Access, a Windows Server
feature, contains RIP support.Quagga, a free open source routing software suite based on GNU
Zebra.OpenBSD, includes a RIP implementationCisco IOS, software used in Cisco routers
(supports version 1, version 2 and RIPng)Cisco NX-OS software used in Cisco Nexus data
center switches (supports RIPv1 and RIPv2)

Similar protocols
Cisco's proprietary Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) was a somewhat more capable
protocol than RIP. It belongs to the same basic family of distance-vector routing protocols. Cisco
has ceased support and distribution of IGRP in their router software. It was replaced by the
Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) which is a completely new design. While
EIGRP still uses a distance-vector model, it relates to IGRP only in using the same routing
metrics.

Routing Updates
RIP sends routing-update messages at regular intervals and when the network topology changes.
When a router receives a routing update that includes changes to an entry, it updates its routing
table to reflect the new route. The metric value for the path is increased by 1, and the sender is
indicated as the next hop. RIP routers maintain only the best route (the route with the lowest
metric value) to a destination. After updating its routing table, the router immediately begins
transmitting routing updates to inform other network routers of the change. These updates are
sent independently of the regularly scheduled updates that RIP routers send.

RIP Routing Metric

RIP uses a single routing metric (hop count) to measure the distance between the source and a
destination network. Each hop in a path from source to destination is assigned a hop count value,
which is typically 1. When a router receives a routing update that contains a new or changed
destination network entry, the router adds 1 to the metric value indicated in the update and enters
the network in the routing table. The IP address of the sender is used as the next hop.

RIP Stability Features

RIP prevents routing loops from continuing indefinitely by implementing a limit on the number
of hops allowed in a path from the source to a destination. The maximum number of hops in a
path is 15. If a router receives a routing update that contains a new or changed entry, and if
increasing the metric value by 1 causes the metric to be infinity (that is, 16), the network
destination is considered unreachable. The downside of this stability feature is that it limits the
maximum diameter of a RIP network to less than 16 hops.

RIP includes a number of other stability features that are common to many routing protocols.
These features are designed to provide stability despite potentially rapid changes in a network's
topology. For example, RIP implements the split horizon and holddown mechanisms to prevent
incorrect routing information from being propagated.

RIP Timers
RIP uses numerous timers to regulate its performance. These include a routing-update timer, a
route-timeout timer, and a route-flush timer. The routing-update timer clocks the interval
between periodic routing updates. Generally, it is set to 30 seconds, with a small random amount
of time added whenever the timer is reset. This is done to help prevent congestion, which could
result from all routers simultaneously attempting to update their neighbors. Each routing table
entry has a route-timeout timer associated with it. When the route-timeout timer expires, the
route is marked invalid but is retained in the table until the route-flush timer expires.

Packet Formats
The following section focuses on the IP RIP and IP RIP 2 packet formats illustrated in Figures
44-1 and 44-2. Each illustration is followed by descriptions of the fields illustrated.

RIP Packet Format

Figure 47-1 illustrates the IP RIP packet format.

Figure 47-1 An IP RIP Packet Consists of Nine Fields

The following descriptions summarize the IP RIP packet format fields illustrated in Figure 47-1:
• Command—Indicates whether the packet is a request or a response. The request asks that a
router send all or part of its routing table. The response can be an unsolicited regular routing
update or a reply to a request. Responses contain routing table entries. Multiple RIP packets are
used to convey information from large routing tables.

• Version number—Specifies the RIP version used. This field can signal different potentially
incompatible versions.

• Zero—This field is not actually used by RFC 1058 RIP; it was added solely to provide
backward compatibility with prestandard varieties of RIP. Its name comes from its defaulted
value: zero.

• Address-family identifier (AFI)—Specifies the address family used. RIP is designed to carry
routing information for several different protocols. Each entry has an address-family identifier to
indicate the type of address being specified. The AFI for IP is 2.

• Address—Specifies the IP address for the entry.

• Metric—Indicates how many internetwork hops (routers) have been traversed in the trip to
the destination. This value is between 1 and 15 for a valid route, or 16 for an unreachable route.

RIP 2 Packet Format

The RIP 2 specification (described in RFC 1723) allows more information to be included in RIP
packets and provides a simple authentication mechanism that is not supported by RIP. Figure 47-
2 shows the IP RIP 2 packet format.

Figure 47-2 An IP RIP 2 Packet Consists of Fields Similar to Those of an IP RIP Packet

The following descriptions summarize the IP RIP 2 packet format fields illustrated in Figure 47-
2:

• Command—Indicates whether the packet is a request or a response. The request asks that a
router send all or a part of its routing table. The response can be an unsolicited regular routing
update or a reply to a request. Responses contain routing table entries. Multiple RIP packets are
used to convey information from large routing tables.

• Version—Specifies the RIP version used. In a RIP packet implementing any of the RIP 2
fields or using authentication, this value is set to 2.
• Unused—Has a value set to zero.

• Address-family identifier (AFI)—Specifies the address family used. RIPv2's AFI field
functions identically to RFC 1058 RIP's AFI field, with one exception: If the AFI for the first
entry in the message is 0xFFFF, the remainder of the entry contains authentication information.
Currently, the only authentication type is simple password.

• Route tag—Provides a method for distinguishing between internal routes (learned by RIP)
and external routes (learned from other protocols).

• IP address—Specifies the IP address for the entry.

• Subnet mask—Contains the subnet mask for the entry. If this field is zero, no subnet mask
has been specified for the entry.

• Next hop—Indicates the IP address of the next hop to which packets for the entry should be
forwarded.

• Metric—Indicates how many internetwork hops (routers) have been traversed in the trip to
the destination. This value is between 1 and 15 for a valid route, or 16 for an unreachable route.

Distance-vector routing protocol

A distance-vector routing protocol is one of the two major classes of routing protocols used in
packet-switched networks for computer communications, the other major class being the link-
state protocol. A distance-vector routing protocol uses the Bellman-Ford algorithm to calculate
paths.

Examples of distance-vector routing protocols include RIPv1 and 2 and IGRP. EGP and BGP are
not pure distance-vector routing protocols, because a distance-vector protocol calculates routes
based only on link costs whereas in BGP, for example, the local route preference value takes
priority over the link cost.

A distance-vector routing protocol requires that a router informs its neighbors of topology
changes periodically and, in some cases, when a change is detected in the topology of a network.
Compared to link-state protocols, which require a router to inform all the nodes in a network of
topology changes, distance-vector routing protocols have less computational complexity and
message overhead

Method
The methods used to calculate the best path for a network are different between different routing
protocols but the fundamental features of distance-vector algorithms are the same across all DV
based protocols.

Distance Vector means that Routers are advertised as vector of distance and Direction. Direction
is simply next hop address and exit interface and Distance means such as hop count.

Routers using distance vector protocol do not have knowledge of the entire path to a destination.
Instead DV uses two methods:

Direction in which or interface to which a packet should be forwarded.

Distance from its destination.

As the name suggests the DV protocol is based on calculating the direction and distance to any
link in a network. The cost of reaching a destination is calculated using various route metrics.
RIP uses the hop count of the destination whereas IGRP takes into account other information
such as node delay and available bandwidth.

Updates are performed periodically in a distance-vector protocol where all or part of a router's
routing table is sent to all its neighbors that are configured to use the same distance-vector
routing protocol. RIP supports cross-platform distance vector routing whereas IGRP is a Cisco
Systems proprietary distance vector routing protocol. Once a router has this information it is able
to amend its own routing table to reflect the changes and then inform its neighbors of the
changes. This process has been described as ‘routing by rumor’ because routers are relying on
the information they receive from other routers and cannot determine if the information is
actually valid and true. There are a number of features which can be used to help with instability
and inaccurate routing information.

Limitations
The Bellman-Ford algorithm does not prevent routing loops from happening and suffers from the
count-to-infinity problem. The core of the count-to-infinity problem is that if A tells B that it has
a path somewhere, there is no way for B to know if the path has B as a part of it. To see the
problem clearly, imagine a subnet connected like A-B-C-D-E-F, and let the metric between the
routers be "number of jumps". Now suppose that A goes down (out of order). In the vector-
update-process B notices that its once very short route of 1 to A is down - B does not receive the
vector update from A. The problem is, B also gets an update from C, and C is still not aware of
the fact that A is down - so it tells B that A is only two jumps from it, which is false. This slowly
propagates through the network until it reaches infinity (in which case the algorithm corrects
itself, due to the "Relax property" of Bellman Ford).

Partial solutions
RIP uses Split Horizon with Poison Reverse technique to reduce the chance of forming loops and
uses a maximum number of hops to counter the 'count-to-infinity' problem. These measures
avoid the formation of routing loops in some, but not all, cases. The addition of a hold time
(refusing route updates for a few minutes after a route retraction) avoids loop formation in
virtually all cases, but causes a significant increase in convergence times.

A number of loop-free distance vector protocols, such as EIGRP and DSDV, have been
developed. These avoid loop formation in all cases, but suffer from increased complexity, and
their deployment has been slowed down by the success of link-state protocols such as OSPF.

Interior gateway protocol

An interior gateway protocol (IGP) is a routing protocol that is used within an autonomous
system (AS).

In contrast an Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) is for determining network reachability between
autonomous systems and makes use of IGPs to resolve routes within an AS.

The interior gateway protocols can be divided into two categories:

1) Distance-vector routing protocol and

2) Link-state routing protocol.

Types of Interior gateway protocols

Distance-vector routing protocol

They use the Bellman-Ford algorithm. In Distance-vector routing protocols each router does not
possess information about the full network topology. It advertises its distances to other routers
and receives similar advertisements from other routers. Using these routing advertisements each
router populates its routing table. In the next advertisement cycle, a router advertises updated
information from its routing table. This process continues until the routing tables of each router
converge to stable values.

Some of these protocols have a disadvantages of slow convergence..

some of the examples of Distance vector routing protocol

Routing Information Protocol (RIP)

Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP)

Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP)s

Link-state routing protocol

In the case of Link-state routing protocols, each node possesses information about the complete
network topology. Each node then independently calculates the best next hop from it for every
possible destination in the network using local information of the topology. The collection of
best next hops forms the routing table for the node.

This contrasts with distance-vector routing protocols, which work by having each node share its
routing table with its neighbors. In a link-state protocol, the only information passed between the
nodes is information used to construct the connectivity maps.

Example of Link-state routing protocols are:

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)

REFERENCES
 www.javvin.com/protocol/rfc10pdf

 Book(data communications and networking)Behrouz A Forouzan

 www.mhhe.com/forouzan/dcn4sie