Use of Dynamic Routing Protocols - Coursework Example

Static routes are configured manually by the administrator which results in better security as compared to dynamic routing protocols (Southwick, Reynolds, Marschke & Marschke, 2011).

Cisco is no longer supporting IGRP because further improvements on the RIP platform were needed thus Enhanced IGRP was developed. IGRP was replaced by the EIGRP protocol. This is because there are fewer IPv4 addresses left, and IGRP assumes all elements of a class belong to the same subnet while EIGRP uses VLSM to maximize the IPv4 addresses left. Change of algorithm to Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL) used by EIGRP is also a contributing factor to the phasing out of |IGRP (Lammle, 2014).

EIGRP takes features of both link-state, and a distance vector protocol and thus is a hybrid dynamic routing protocol. EIGRP is event-driven and routing information is sent in case of change in the network or during startup. This is a link state characteristic. EIGRP also sends routing table information to its immediate neighbors, which is a distance vector characteristic (Donahue, 2011).

OSPF has many advantages over EIGRP namely: OSPF is usable on a multi-vendor platform while EIGRP is a CISCO-only solution which is limiting. As written by Southwick et al. (2011), SPF supports hierarchical networks while EIGRP is mostly used in flat networks and does not support scalability (p. 167).