Summing Up
RIP is a relatively simple protocol, easy to configure and very reliable. The robustness of RIP is evident from the fact that various implementations of RIP differ in details and yet work well together. A standard for RIP wasn’t put forth until 1988 (by Charles Hedrick, in RFC 1058). Small, homogeneous networks are a good match for RIP. However, as networks grow, other routing protocols may look more attractive for several reasons:
The RIP metric does not account for link bandwidth or delay.
The exchange of full routing updates every 30 seconds does not scale for large networks -- the overhead of generating and processing all routes can be high.
RIP convergence times can be too long.
Subnet mask information is not exchanged in RIP updates, so Variable Length Subnet Masks are not supported.
The RIP metric restricts the network diameter to 15 hops.
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