Route Redistribution Redistribution is necessary when routing protocols connect and must pass routes between the two. Route Redistribution involves placing the routes learned from one routing domain, such as RIP, into another routing domain, such as EIGRP. While running a single routing protocol throughout your entire IP internetwork is desirable, multiprotocol routing is common for a number of reasons, such as company mergers, multiple departments managed by multiple network administrators, and multi-vendor environments. Running different routing protocols is often part of a network design. In any case, having a multiple protocol environment makes redistribution a necessity.
Figure 1 Route
Redistribution Example
Redistribution Challenge The challenge to redistributing routing protocols is that each routing protocol uses its own metric and they are not compatible with each other. Furthermore, there is no magic algorithm than can automatically translate metrics between, say RIP and BGP. Differences in routing protocol characteristics, such as metrics, administrative distance, classful and classless capabilities can effect redistribution. Consideration must be given to these differences for redistribution to succeed. Each routing protocol has its own way of determining the best path to a network. RIP uses hops, and EIGRP and IGRP both use a composite metric of bandwidth, delay, reliability, load, and MTU size. Because of the differences in metric calculations, when redistributing routes, you lose all metrics and must manually specify the cost metric for each routing domain. This is because RIP has no way of translating bandwidth, delay, reliability, load, and MTU size into hops, and vice versa. Another issue to address with route redistribution is that some routing protocols are classful, meaning that the routing protocol does not send subnet mask information in the routing updates (for example, in RIP and IGRP).