Rather than use manually assigned routes, RIP routers uses broadcasts to describe and build a map of the network dynamically. RIP routers listen for updates from other RIP routers, and build a map of the available routers and the networks that they serve.
Every sixty seconds, every RIP router publishes the entire network map, and then they each consolidate any additions, changes or deletions into their private map again. Because of the broadcast-intensive nature of RIP, it does not work well in complex organizations, or in WAN environments with limited bandwidth.
However, it does provide for a flexible environment, as every RIP-aware system on the network can simply monitor the RIP broadcasts for network routing information. You would not need to define default or static routes on your systems if they were to use RIP.
Although RIP is inefficient, it has been around longer than any other routing protocol and is bundled with a variety of platforms. Because of this, RIP is still used quite frequently on many LANs and across many small organizations.
Another routing protocol that is much more efficient (and complicated) than RIP is OSPF. For more information on OSPF, refer to section 3 Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). For information on manually-defined routing maps, refer to section 1 Static Routing.
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