RIP Hop Count Calculator — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

How RIP fills the routing tables, from the lesson: - Each router starts with its directly connected networks. - In each round, every router sends its whole routing table to its neighbors. A neighbor records each network one hop farther than the sender, with the sender as the next hop. - A network reaches one more router per round, so a network k hops away arrives in round k. When no router learns anything new, the network has converged. - Where two neighbors offer the same network, RIP keeps the fewer hops, even over slower links: hop count ignores bandwidth.

What you'll learn

Work out the hop count and next hop a RIP router records for a network, and the round in which it learns it
Explain that RIP picks the path with the fewest hops, whatever the link speeds, and that each router learns routes only from its neighbors

Aligned to

Cisco CCNA

3.2 Determine how a router makes a forwarding decision by default

3.1 Interpret the components of routing table

Key terms

Routing Information Protocol: One of the oldest distance-vector routing protocols, using hop count as its sole routing metric with a maximum of 15 hops to prevent routing loops. RIP sends full routing table updates periodically and converges slowly compared to modern protocols, making it suitable only for small networks.
Hop Count: A metric used by distance vector protocols that counts the number of routers a packet must pass through to reach its destination.
Distance Vector: A type of routing algorithm where each router periodically shares its entire routing table with directly connected neighbors, calculating the best path based on a distance metric such as hop count. Distance vector protocols such as RIP converge more slowly than link-state protocols but are simpler to configure.
Next Hop: The IP address of the immediately adjacent router that a packet is forwarded to on the way toward its final destination. A router's routing table entry for each network destination includes the next-hop address so the router knows where to send the packet.
Convergence: The state in which all routers in a network have consistent and up-to-date routing information after a topology change.

Topics

Routing Rip Hop Count Distance Vector Convergence Interactive Calculation

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