Dynamic routing switches

Dynamic Routing (RIP)

— switch support for dynamic routing via RIP protocol.

Routing is the definition of the path along which a particular data packet is sent to its destination. For this, special routing tables are used, stored in the memory of the control network device (devices). And the idea of dynamic routing is that the route table is constantly edited programmatically, in automatic mode. To do this, network devices (more precisely, routing programs running on them) exchange service information with each other, on the basis of which optimal addresses are written to the table. One of the fundamental concepts of dynamic routing is a metric — a complex indicator that determines the conditional distance to a specific address (in other words, how close this or that route is to the optimal one).

Different protocols can be used for this type of routing; they differ both in terms of the definition of the metric and in the format of data exchange. And RIP is one of the most popular such protocols; it has relatively modest capabilities, but is undemanding to the hardware and easy to implement. Metrics in RIP are determined solely by the number of hops — sections between intermediate nodes located between the switch and the destination of the packet; at the same time, the maximum number of hops is limited to 15. Another limitation for use in complex networks is that the complication of the topology leads to a significant increase in service traffic and the load on the computing part of the equipment — as a result, the actual network performance decreases. However, even these features are often enough, and more advanced protocols are more difficult and expensive to implement. Therefore, if the switch supports dynamic routing at all, it, usually, is almost guaranteed to support the RIP protocol, but the set of other protocols should be specified separately.