The course will help you to build foundation for the CCNA exam. It covers the routing topic for the CCNA 200-301 exam. Common routing protocols include RIP, RIPv2, IGRP, EIGRP, IS-IS and BGP. For the CCNA exam you will need to be well versed in RIP, RIPv2, IGRP and EIGRP. You should be aware of IS-IS and BGP, and be able to configure basic OSPF. Two main types of routing protocols exist - distance vector and link state.

A routed protocol is any network layer protocol that provides enough information in its network layer address to allow a packet to be forwarded from one host to another host based on the addressing scheme, without knowing the entire path from source to destination. Routed protocols define the format and use of the fields within a packet. Packets generally are conveyed from end system to end system. Almost all network layer protocols and those that are layered over them are routable, with IP being an example.

Data Link protocols such as Ethernet are necessarily non-routable protocols, since they contain only a link-layer address, which is insufficient for routing: some higher-level protocols based directly on these without the addition of a network layer address, such as 'NetBIOS', are also non-routable.

Routing protocols

Routing protocols are used in the implementation of routing algorithms to facilitate the exchange of routing information between networks, allowing routers to build routing tables dynamically. In some cases, routing protocols can themselves run over routed protocols: for example, BGP runs over TCP: care is taken in the implementation of such systems not to create a circular dependency between the routing and routed protocols.