IEEE Sponsored 2nd International Conference on Innovations in Information Embedded and Communication Systems ICIIECS’15
A Comparative study on RIP and OSPF protocols
Analysis of RIP and OSPF protocols using GNS-3
Megha Jayakumar1 N Ramya Shanthi Rekha1
Student
Faculty of Computing
Sathyabama University
Chennai, India
megha24051994@gmail.com,www.ramya1693@gmail.com
Abstract - Routing of data packets is one of the important
process in the internet. A routing protocol specifies the method of
communication among routers used in the inter connection of
networks. There are number of routing protocols which have
application on the internet like OSPF, RIP, EIGRP, OPNET,
IGRP, etc. Every protocol has its own feature of packet routing.
This paper presents a simple comparative study of RIP and
OSPF dynamic routing protocols. The Routing Information
Protocol (RIP) comes under the distance vector algorithm and
the Open Shortest Path First Protocol(OSPF) is a link state
routing algorithm.
Index terms – RIP, OSPF, Routing Protocols, Dynamic Routing,
Routers
I. INTRODUCTION
A routing protocol shows the communication between various
routers. It is used to determine the routes. Each router contains
details of its neighboring networks only. A routing protocol
shares this information first among immediate neighbors, and
then throughout the network. This way, routers gain
knowledge of the topology of the network. The classification
of Routing are basically into two types namely static routing
and dynamic routing. Static routing is done manually whereas
dynamic routing uses certain protocols. RIP, OSPF, IGRP,
EIGRP and IS-IS are some of the routing protocols. All these
are interior gateway routing protocols. RIP is a distance vector
routing protocol, OSPF is a link state routing protocol and
EIGRP is a hybrid protocol. The performance of RIP and
OSPF can be analyzed by using GNS-3.
II. STATIC AND DYNAMIC ROUTING
Static routing is the routing in which the routing entry is given
manually. The network administrator adds entries into the
routing table and configures the routes manually. Static
routing is fixed and it does not change if the network is
changed or rebuilt which contradicts dynamic routing.
Example for adding a static route using GNS3 software:
978-1-4799-6818-3/15/$31.00 © 2015 IEEE
Dr.B.Bharathi2
Professor
Faculty of Computing
Sathyabama University
Chennai, India
bharathi.cse@sathyabamauniversity.ac.in
Router1# configure terminal // this goes to global
configuration mode
Router1(config)# ip route 10.10.20.0 255.255.255.0
192.168.100.1
Dynamic routing can be defined as the capability of a system
to change the routes accordingly when any modification is
done in the network. Dynamic routing is also known as
Adaptive routing.There are several dynamic routing protocols
like RIP, OSPF, EIGRP, IGRP AND IS-IS.
III. ROUTING INFORMATION PROTOCOL (RIP)
RIP is a distance vector routing algorithm and it makes use of
hop count as the metric. Hop count can be defined as the
number of intermediate devices through which data is
transferred from the source to the destination. The maximum
number of hops is 15, which means that the data can be
transferred through a maximum of 16 nodes. This is one of the
major limitation of RIP. It cannot exceed the hop count limit
of 15. A hop count of 16 is also considered as unreachable.It
implements split horizon,route poisoning and hold-down
mechanisms to prevent wrong routing information from being
sent. RIP transfers in every 30s. RIPv1, RIPv2, RIPng are
different versions of the RIP. Table 1 shows the differences
between the versions of RIP. After enabling the RIP in the
network the RIP protocols advertise its broadcast messages to
all the RIP interfaces and receives the response.The router
table gets updated once in every 30 secs.The routing protocol
priority is set by using the administrative distance value which
is 120 by default.
A. RIPv1
RIPv1 is based on local broadcasting. The updates occur in
every 30s. There is a hop count limit to prevent the packets
from going around the loop forever. Any packet that is on the
 IEEE Sponsored 2nd International Conference on Innovations in Information Embedded and Communication Systems ICIIECS’15

16th hop is discarded. It is a classfull protocol. There is also no iv) Efficient and reliable transport of routing updates.
support for router authentication, making RIP prone to various v) It provides scalability.
attacks.
A. OSPFv1
B. RIPv2

RIPv2 is a distance vector routing protocol which is an
enhancement of RIPv1. It is also called as hybrid routing
protocol. RIPv2 uses multicasts whereas RIPv1
uses broadcasts. RIPv2 supports triggered updates.It notifies
any changes that RIPv2 is a classless protocol and it
supports variable-length subnet masking (VLSM). Both
RIPv1 and RIPv2 uses hop count as the metric.
TABLE.I.DIFFERENCES BETWEEN RIPv1 AND RIPv2
RIPv1 RIPv2
- classful routing -classless
routing(supports VLSM)
-No authentication -authentication is
available
-it uses broadcast -it uses multicast
C. RIPng
RIPng stands for RIP next generation. It is an extension of
RIPv2 which supports IPv6. The major enhancement in RIPng
is that it supports Ipv6 and it does not support authentication.
RIPv2 allows attaching arbitrary tags to routes, RIPng does
not. RIP also has architectural limitations to not exceed 15
hop counts. It is prone to routing loops when the routing tables
are reconstructed especially when it is implemented in large
networks. It might take extremely long time to resolve routing
loops.
IV. OPEN SHORTEST PATH FIRST
OSPF is a router protocol which is used for larger networks
other than using RIP. OSPF immediately multicasts any
changes that is made in the network to all the other hosts. RIP
advertises the entire routing table, whereas OSPF sends only
the part that has changed. RIP sends the routing table to the
neighbors in every 30 seconds. OSPF multicasts the updated
information only when a change has taken place. It also sends
hello packets in every 10s.
N number of routers are supported in the OSPF protocol with
fast convergence.The OSPFv1 is used for detecting any errors
in the network.OSPFv1 cannot support IPv6 network.
B. OSPFv2
This is the next version of the OSPF v1.There are many
limitations for OSPFv1 which can be overcome by OSPFv2. It
is used for fast convergence in IPV4 network with accurate
error detection. .It cannot be used for an IPv6 network.
C. OSPFv3
This version of OSPF protocol is used for IPv6 network.It is
very similar to OSPFv2 in its functioning, the only difference
being that it is used for IPV6 network and OSPFv2 is used for
IPV4 network.It uses area 0 as the backbone of the
network.OSPv3 will be having three types of addresses like
area id, router id and link state id. Using these ids the OSPF
protocol communicates with the routers in the network.
V. COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS
An overall comparative analysis of RIP and OSPF protocols is
given in table 2. RIP sends the contents of the routing table
every 30s whereas OSPF sends hello packets in every 10s and
when any data is updated, it sends the updated data alone and
not the whole routing database. OSPF may be considered
better than RIP, but its complexity doesn’t allow it to be used
by everyone. The comparison between RIP and OSPF is done
in terms of Latency, Throughput, Convergence time and
Packet Loss. The result obtained is shown in the form of a bar
graph.

Significant features of OSPF:

i) Fast convergence: OSPF updates any changes in the
network topology to the neighboring routers.
ii) Support for large networks: the network diameter is
virtually limitless.
iii) Fully classless routing protocol
 IEEE Sponsored 2nd International Conference on Innovations in Information Embedded and Communication Systems ICIIECS’15

Architecture

6 ROUTERS-R1,R2,R3,R4,R5,R6
5 SWITCHES-SW1,SW2,SW3,SW4,SW5
8 CLOUDS-C1,C2,C3,C4,C5,C5,C7,C8

Fig.3.Analysing the packet loss using Wireshark

Fig.1.Architecture diagram used for analysis(GNS-3 Software)

The results obtained after performing analysis for latency,

throughput, convergence time and packet loss in GNS-3 are
shown below in terms of a bar graph.

Fig.2.The comparison graph showing the performance anlaysis of RIP and

OSPF in terms of Latency, Convergence Time, Throughput and packet loss
Fig.4.After implementing both RIP and OSPF, OSPF is chosen
because of its lower Administrative distance value
 IEEE Sponsored 2nd International Conference on Innovations in Information Embedded and Communication Systems ICIIECS’15

TABLE.II.COMPARISON OF RIP AND OSPF other hand has fast convergence and efficiently uses the
METRICS RIP OSPF bandwidth. Since OSPF has fast convergence, packet loss is
No of nodes Maximum of 16 N number of nodes less. The throughput rate is higher for OSPF than RIP. Hence
nodes only can be can be used reliability and efficiency of OSPF is more than RIP. OSPF has
used the least cost of transmission compared to RIP. When OSPF
Shares Shares the whole Shares the link alone and RIP are implemented together in a network, OSPF is
database chosen over RIP as it has a lower administrative distance
Data known Contains details Contains details of value than RIP. OSPF is the best choice for larger networks
only about its the entire database and RIP can be limited to simple and small networks.
neighbors
Advertising time The The advertisements
advertisements are sent in every 10s
are sent in every
30s
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