A Comprehensive Study and Analysis of Different Routing Protocols for Enterprise LAN

Due to growth of economy, government policies, available inexpensive smart devices and low cost broadband services in both developed and developing countries the numbers of Internet users are increasing drastically over the last decades. Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 have become global trends. Through Internet of Things (IoT) everyone will be connected his/her devices at home, at work stations, on road, at field or anywhere else. In a network topology, various protocols are used for forwarding the packets. Routes of information (packets) are established by appropriate routing protocols. A routing table is managed by the router for successful delivery of packets from the exact predefined nodes i.e. source node to destination node. The amount of information stored by the router about the network depends on the algorithm it follows. Most of the used popular routing algorithms are RIP, OSPF, IGRP and EIGRP. In this report, we have tried to evaluate the performance of RIP, OSPF, IGRP and EIGRP for the parameters: convergence, throughput, queuing delay and end to end delay utilization through simulation which has been performed using OPNET. We have tried to find out the best protocol suits for the designed Enterprise Local Area Network (ELAN) as well as pros and cons of each protocol.