Understanding RIP Traffic Control with Metrics

To tune a RIP network and control traffic flowing through the network, you increase or decrease the cost of the paths through the network. RIP provides two ways to modify the path cost: an incoming metric and an outgoing metric, which are each set to 1 by default. These metrics are attributes that manually specify the cost of any route advertised through a host. By increasing or decreasing the metrics—and thus the cost—of links throughout the network, you can control packet transmission across the network.

The incoming metric modifies the cost of an individual segment when a route across the segment is imported into the routing table. For example, if you set the incoming metric on the segment to 3, the individual segment cost along the link is changed from 1 to 3. The increased cost affects all route calculations through that link. Other routes that were previously excluded because of a high hop count might now be selected into the router's forwarding table.

The outgoing metric modifies the path cost for all the routes advertised out a particular interface. Unlike the incoming metric, the outgoing metric modifies the routes that other routers are learning and thereby controls the way they send traffic.

If an exported route was learned from a member of the same RIP group, the metric associated with that route is the normal RIP metric. For example, a RIP route with a metric of 5 learned from a neighbor configured with an incoming metric of 2 is advertised with a combined metric of 7 when advertised to neighbors in the same group. However, if this route was learned from a RIP neighbor in a different group or from a different protocol, the route is advertised with the metric value configured in the outgoing metric for that group.

Understanding RIP Traffic Control with Metrics

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