Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP)

Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP)

Interior Gateway Routing Protocol is a distance vector routing protocol developed by Cisco systems for routing multiple protocols for small and medium sized Cisco networks.  It is more accessible than Routing Information Protocol (RIP) since it supports a hop count of 100. IGRP has less bandwidth than RIP but converges much slower. IGRP does recognize assignment of different autonomous systems and automatically summarizes at network class boundaries. As well there is the option to load balance traffic across equal or unequal metric cost paths.

Characteristics

·         Distance Vector

·         Routes IP, IPX,

·         Routing Table Advertisements Every 90 Seconds

·         Hop Count: 100

·         Fixed Length Subnet Masks

·         Summarization on Network Class Address

·         Load Balancing Across 6 Equal or Unequal Cost Paths ( IOS 11.0 )

·         Update Timer: 90 seconds

·         Invalid Timer: 270 seconds

·         Hold down Timer: 280 seconds