What is the primary use of Routing Information Protocol (RIP)?

What is the primary use of Routing Information Protocol (RIP)?

• A. Exterior gateway routing
• B. Interior gateway routing
• C. Wireless routing
• D. Host-to-host routing

Answer: (B)

RIP is designed to operate inside a single administrative network, so its primary use is as an interior gateway protocol. This means routers within the same autonomous system share routing information to learn paths to all destinations and build a coherent internal routing table. It uses hop count as its metric and relies on broadcasts or multicast updates between neighboring routers to propagate reachability information. Exterior gateway protocols, by contrast, manage routes between different autonomous systems, which is not what RIP is built for. Wireless routing isn’t a formal category for RIP, and host-to-host routing refers to end devices communicating, not how routers exchange routes. Therefore, the best fit is interior gateway routing, as RIP’s role is to handle internal route information within one network.

RIP is designed to operate inside a single administrative network, so its primary use is as an interior gateway protocol. This means routers within the same autonomous system share routing information to learn paths to all destinations and build a coherent internal routing table. It uses hop count as its metric and relies on broadcasts or multicast updates between neighboring routers to propagate reachability information.

Exterior gateway protocols, by contrast, manage routes between different autonomous systems, which is not what RIP is built for. Wireless routing isn’t a formal category for RIP, and host-to-host routing refers to end devices communicating, not how routers exchange routes. Therefore, the best fit is interior gateway routing, as RIP’s role is to handle internal route information within one network.