Distance Vector Routing Protocol

In Distance Vector Routing, the #Routers share their Routing Table with their direct neighbour(s) (often termed “routing by rumour”) periodically. The table stores routing information which describes the direction (router and the corresponding port) where the packets should be forwarded to and the distance using one of the metrics (See in #Routing Protocol). When a router receives the information via this method, it will undergo a process called distance accumulation, that is, increments the distance by one. By this way, routers within the network are ignorant to its topology. The process is usually done by the Bellman-Ford algorithm.

Although the protocol is blessed by its simplicity, it doesn’t scale well when the number of routers grows larger and larger, which could make the routing table extreme large. The exchange of such information can be quite expensive, and would degrade the network performance as a result.

It is best used simple and flat network or specific types of networks such as hub-and-spoke networks#. If the worst-case Convergence# times in the network is not a concern, which is the worst disadvantage of using a Distance Vector Routing Protocol.

Examples of such protocol:

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