Mike Meyers’ CompTIA Network+ Certification Passport, 4th Edition (Exam N10-005), 4th Edition

Distance Vector

Distance vector routing protocols use one of several algorithms to determine the best route to other routers based on the distance (cost) and direction (vector).

The simplest total cost sums the hops (the hop count) between a router and a network. A hop is defined as each time a packet goes through a router. So if you had a router one hop away from a network, the cost for that route would be 1; if it were two hops away, the cost would be 2.

All network connections are not equal. A router might have a pair of one-hop routes to a network—one using a fast connection and the other using a slow connection. The slow single-hop route, for example, might have a metric of 10 rather than the default of 1 to reflect the fact that it’s ...