IP Routing Protocols: RIP, OSPF, BGP, PNNI and Cisco Routing Protocols

Without some practical study, you might drive yourself crazy wondering how an e-mail message gets from Brussels to Hong Kong via a series of routers that, by themselves, have no specific knowledge of either city. Uyless Black, best known for his defining works on voice over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, has written IP Routing Protocols to explain the various route-finding algorithms. The book stays one step removed from the details of specific routing hardware and software platforms, instead explaining routing protocols as they're defined in standards documents. IP Routing Protocols, therefore, comes across as a bit academic at times, but active router technicians will find the approach clarifies their understanding of procedures used in their work.

After introducing the engineering problems routing protocols are meant to solve, the book describes five (or six, if you want to separate IGRP and EIGRP) such protocols. It explains how each one came to exist and lists its relative strengths and weaknesses, plus how each protocol calculates the best-available routes, advertises these routes to neighbors, and deals with problems.

IP Routing Protocols's dense style rewards readers willing to study the words carefully and draw meaning from the utilitarian conceptual drawings. The book will also pay the greatest dividends to readers who have used the covered routing protocols in practice, and can connect the high-level explanations to real-life observed phenomena. --David Wall

Topics covered: The most popular routing protocols used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks and internetworks, including Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and Private Network-Network Interface (PNNI). The book also briefly discusses two proprietary Cisco protocols, Inter-Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) and Enhanced IGRP (EIGRP).