I have written at length about the TCP/IP protocol suite. All of
those protocols are routed ones, but what are they in turn
routed by? Read on to get a high level overview of the routing
protocols, and how they fit into our online lives. The routed
vs. the routing There has always been a great attraction for me
to the networking protocols. I don’t know why I have always been
fascinated by them, but they do interest me greatly. A good deal
of my time has been spent studying and playing with the
protocols contained in the TCP/IP protocol suite. What all those
protocols have in common is that they are routed protocols. This
begs the question of what routes them? A very good question
indeed, and one that a great many books have been written about.
What I shall cover in this article is a breakdown of what
routing protocols are. How they work, and what kinds of routing
protocols there are. Things I won’t be covering are the Cisco
IOS syntax used when configuring these routing protocols. Quite
a few excellent books