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Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is a commonly used protocol for managing router information within a self-contained network, such as a corporate local area network or an interconnected group of such LANs. RIP is classified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as one of several internal gateway protocols (Interior Gateway Protocol). RIP is intended for small homogeneous networks.Using RIP, a gateway host (with a router) sends its entire routing table, which lists all the other hosts that it recognizes, to its closest neighbor host every 30 seconds. The neighbor host then passes the information on to its next available neighbor and so on until all hosts within the network have the same knowledge of routing paths. This is known as network convergence. RIP uses a hop count as a means to determine network distance. Other protocols use more sophisticated algorithms, including timing. Each host with a router in the network uses the routing table information to determine the next host to route a packet to a specified destination.
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