Talk:Routing

EIGRP is not a link-state protocol

I'm getting really tired of seeing the Cisco marketing balderdash about EIGRP being a "hybrid" of link-state routing and destination-vector routing spammed across Wikipedia, and even more tired of seeing repeatedly inserted after I keep removing it. I'm therefore going to spam this across every Talk: page where I see this claim, and a shorter note to the effect that EIGRP has no link-state stuff at all, in the articles.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that EIGRP has any link-state aspects.

EIGRP is simply a multi-metric, event-driven, destination-vector routing protocol. Neither the "multi-metric" part nor the "event-driven" part has anything to do with link-state.

Link-state protocols have the following characteristics:

• they distribute topology maps, not routing tables
• nodes run a shortest-path algorithm such as Dijkstra over the map to produce the routing table

EIGRP does neither.

Clearly, one can design link-state protocols to be either event-driven, or not; all done to date (from the original "new" ARPANet routing algorithm) have been so, but that's purely a design decision. Event-driven or not-event-drive is a completely separate design axis.

Now stop adding this bogus nonsense! Noel (talk) 04:57, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"Hybrid" protocols

I removed the following text from the page:

There is also a third method called hybrid: Hybrid protocols are a combination of link-state and distance-vector routing protocols. Hybrid protocols have rapid convergence (like link-state protocols) but use much less memory and processor power than link-state protocols. Hybrid protocols use distance-vectors for more accurate metrics and to determine the best path to destination.

because most of it's untrue. The only true MD/DV hybrid (it wasn't even link-state, but rather Map-Distribution, a larger class that includes link-state) ever even proposed (that I know of) was the "Unified" design of Rehkter and Estrin, circa 1988 or so (Deborah Estrin, Yakov Rekhter and Steve Hotz, "A Unified Approach to Inter-Domain Routing", RFC 1322) but it did not have the characteristics of "rapid convergence ... but use much less memory and processor power than link-state."

This whole "hybrid" think is Cisco marketing crap that most people seem to have swallowed hook, line and sinker - I assume because they don't really understand routing. Noel (talk) 05:22, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Comparison of Routing Algorithms - suggestion

Perhaps this info would be easier to read if placed in a table. Decisions are generally easier to make if the direct comparisons are clear. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.104.209.228 (talk • contribs)

bridging vs. routing; maybe reword or elaborate

The introduction goes on to mention bridging, introducing it with:

Routing, in a narrower sense of the term, often refers to IP routing and is contrasted with bridging.

This of course is true, however it ends the paragraph with this here:

Routing has become the dominant form of addressing on the Internet. Bridging is still widely used within local area networks.

This makes it seem as if routing and bridging were competing mechanisms, in most cases I've seen there is a stark difference in use-cases as routing is usually introduced to split a network into segments (often to allow firewalling/access control). Bridging does not usually segment the network rather than joining two networks that would otherwise be segmented. The only way in which bridging does segment is in combination with VLANs, however there it is the VLAN part that segments, the bridge still provides a flat link layer. Since the text starts off describing that one technology is contrasted to another, I feel like that difference in use-case should be highlighted, conveying that they are not competing solutions, rather than individual solutions for different problems. — benaryorg (talk • no pronouns) 03:41, 18 December 2024 (UTC)