What metric does RIP use to determine path cost?

What metric does RIP use to determine path cost?

• A. Hop count
• B. Bandwidth
• C. Latency
• D. MTU

Answer: (A)

RIP uses hop count as the path cost metric. Each router hop adds one to the total distance to a destination, so the best path is the one with the smallest number of hops. Routers share their hop-count distances, and the route with the lowest total hops is preferred. This simple approach makes RIP easy to implement, but it also limits network size and performance visibility: a maximum of 15 hops is allowed, with 16 treated as unreachable. Because the metric is just hop count, RIP doesn’t account for link bandwidth, latency, or MTU, unlike some other routing protocols that weight paths by these factors.

RIP uses hop count as the path cost metric. Each router hop adds one to the total distance to a destination, so the best path is the one with the smallest number of hops. Routers share their hop-count distances, and the route with the lowest total hops is preferred. This simple approach makes RIP easy to implement, but it also limits network size and performance visibility: a maximum of 15 hops is allowed, with 16 treated as unreachable. Because the metric is just hop count, RIP doesn’t account for link bandwidth, latency, or MTU, unlike some other routing protocols that weight paths by these factors.