www.tjprc.org editor@tjprc.org ROUTE REDISTRIBUTION: BEYOND INHERENT METRICS Dr. PAUL DANQUAH IT Professional, IT Council Limited, Accra, Ghana ABSTRACT Route redistributions are considered necessary in various contexts, some of which are as a result of multiple departments managed by multiple network administrators, multi-vendor environments and company mergers. This study set out to redistribute routes between RIP and EIGRP routing protocols and assess the performance beyond inherent metrics. Round trip times over varied bandwidths were used as a basis for comparison with RIP and EIGRP used as the routing protocols. An experiment was set up using the Packet Tracer simulator and two separate networks were integrated via route redistribution of the two routing protocols. Despite regular surges in data transmission as a result inherent routing protocols’ propagation of learned routes and advertisements, the results obtained from the experiment suggests that inherent metrics of the routing protocols do still play a significant role and is an integral component in determining performance of network links with redistributed routes. KEYWORDS: Routing Protocols, Route Redistribution & Routing Metrics Received: Aug 10, 2019; Accepted: Sep 01, 2019; Published: Dec 05, 2019; Paper Id.: IJCNWMCDEC20192 INTRODUCTION The use of dynamic routing protocols have become prominent in modern large-scale networks. They tend to be the most effective and efficient routing methods to support modern network on a large scale as against static routing. Dynamic routing protocols may be implemented to reduce administrative work and also make room for scalability of networks. Routing dynamically requires the implementation and configuration of routing protocols, which are a set of rules by which routers share some information about the connectivity, path to destination and networks’ availability. The procedure makes use of routing metrics that are determined through specific routing algorithms of the specific routing protocol in use. When routing protocols are used to advertise routes obtained by different means, for example, by static routes, interfaces that are directly connected or through other routing protocols, this is referred to as route redistribution. This situation never arises in the case of single protocol routing environment but multi-protocol routing is common for a number of reasons, like company mergers, multiple departments managed by multiple network administrators and multi-vendor environments”. 1 The route redistribution aims at two possible objectives, the “first goal is to advertise routing information between different routing protocols for connectivity purposes. The second goal is route back up in case of a network failure, routing protocol should support alternate forwarding paths to each other”. Moreover, the solutions are most applicable to circumstances with just two routing protocols, but relatively enormous working networks usually include multiple (more than two) routing protocols 2 . The objective of this research is to redistribute routes between RIP and EIGRP routing protocols and assess the performance beyond inherent metrics. Specifically, network round trip times over varied bandwidths are used as a basis for comparison. The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) version 2 and the Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocols (EIGRP) are used in the experiment. Original Article International Journal of Computer Networking, Wireless and Mobile Communications (IJCNWMC) ISSN (P): 2250–1568; ISSN (E): 2278–9448 Vol. 9, Issue 2, Dec 2019, 7–14 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.