4. Routing Protocols

Lesson Content

It would be a pain to have to manually configure routes on a routing table for every device on your network, so instead we use what are known as routing protocols. Routing protocols are used to help our system adapt to network changes, it learns of different routes, builds them in the routing table and then routes our packets through that way. There are two primary routing protocol types, distance vector protocols and link state protocols.

Convergence

Before we talk about the protocols, we should go over a term using in routing known as convergence. When using routing protocols, routers communicate with other routers to collect and exchange information about the network. When they agree on how a network should look, every routing table maps out the complete topology of the network, thus “converging”. When something occurs in the network topology, the convergence will temporarily break until all routers are aware of this change.

Exercise

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Quiz Question

# What is the term used when all routing tables know the network topology? > A routing table is a set of rules, often viewed in table format, that's used to determine where data packets traveling over an Internet Protocol (IP) network will be directed. This table is usually stored inside the Random Access Memory of forwarding devices, such as routers and network switches. 1. [ ] Flooding 2. [ ] ARK 3. [ ] divergence 4. [x] convergence