Administrative distance

Administrative distance is the first criterion that a router uses to determine which routing protocol to use if two protocols provide route information for the same destination. Administrative distance is a measure of the trustworthiness of the source of the routing information. Administrative distance has only local significance, and is not advertised in routing updates. Note: The smaller the administrative distance value, the more reliable the protocol. For example, if a router receives a route to a certain network from both Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) (default administrative distance - 110) and Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) (default administrative distance - 100), the router chooses IGRP because IGRP is more reliable. This means the router adds the IGRP version of the route to the routing table. If you lose the source of the IGRP-derived information (for example, due to a power shutdown), the software uses the OSPF-derived information until the IGRP-derived information reappears. Default Distance Value Table This table lists the administrative distance default values of the protocols that Cisco supports:
Route Source

* If the administrative distance is 255, the router does not believe the source of that route and does not install the route in the routing table.

Advantages and disadvantages of Static/dynamic Routing

Advantages of Static Routing
Static routing has some enormous advantages over dynamic routing. Chief among these advantages is predictability. Because the network administrator computes the routing table in advance, the path a packet takes between two destinations is always known precisely, and can be controlled exactly. With dynamic routing, the path taken depends on which devices and links are functioning, and how the routers have interpreted the updates from other routers
Additionally, because no dynamic routing protocol is needed, static routing doesn't impose any overhead on the routers or the network links. While this overhead may be minimal on an FDDI ring, or even on an Ethernet segment, it could be a significant portion of network bandwidth on a low-speed dial-up link. Consider a network with 200 network segments. Every 30 seconds, as required by the RIP specification, the routers all send an update containing reachability information for all 200 of these segments. With each route taking 16 octets of space, plus a small amount of overhead, the minimum size for an update in this network is over three kilobytes. Each router must therefore send a 3 Kb update on each of its interfaces every 30 seconds. As you can see, for a large network, the bandwidth devoted to routing updates can add up quickly.
Finally, static routing is easy to configure on a small network. The network administrator simply tells each router how to reach every network segment to which it is not directly attached
Disadvantages of Static Routing
While static routing has advantages over dynamic routing, it is not without its disadvantages. The price of its simplicity is a lack of scalability. For five network segments on three routers, computing an appropriate route from every router to every destination is not difficult. However, many networks are much larger. Consider what the routing might look like for a network with 200 network segments interconnected by more than a dozen routers. To implement static routing, you would need to compute the next hop for each network segment for each router, or more than 2,400 routes! As you can see, the task of precomputing routing tables quickly becomes a burden, and is prone to errors.
Of course, you could argue that this computation need only occur once, when the network is first built. But what happens when a network segment moves, or is added? While the computation may be relatively easy, to implement the change, you would have to update the configuration for every router on the network. If you miss one, in the best case, segments attached to that router will be unable to reach the moved or added segment. In the worst case, you'll create a routing loop that affects many routers.
Finally, because static routing is, by definition, static, it cannot use redundant network links to adapt to a failure in the network.

Advantages of Dynamic Routing
The chief advantages of dynamic routing over static routing are scalability and adaptability. A dynamically routed network can grow more quickly and larger, and is able to adapt to changes in the network topology brought about by this growth or by the failure of one or more network components.


With a dynamic routing protocol, routers learn about the network topology by communicating with other routers. Each router announces its presence, and the routes it has available, to the other routers on the network. Therefore, if you add a new router, or add an additional segment to an existing router, the other routers will hear about the addition and adjust their routing tables accordingly. You don't have to reconfigure the routers to tell them that the network has changed. Similarly, if you move a network segment, the other routers will hear about the change. You only need to change the configuration of the router (or routers) that connect the segment that moved. This reduces the chance that errors will occur.
The ability to learn about changes to the network's configuration has implications beyond adding new segments or moving old ones. It also means that the network can adjust to failures. If a network has redundant paths, then a partial network failure appears to the routers as if some segments got moved (they are now reached via alternate paths), and some segments have been removed from the network (they are now unreachable). In short, there's no real difference between a network failure and a configuration change. Dynamic routing allows the network to continue functioning, perhaps in a degraded fashion, when a partial failure occurs.

Disadvantages of Dynamic Routing
Chief among the disadvantages is an increase in complexity. Communicating information about network topology is not as simple as saying, ''Hey, I can reach thefollowing destinations" Each router participating in the dynamic routing protocol must decide exactly what information to send to other routers; more important, it must attempt to select the best route for reaching other destinations from the candidates it learns about from other routers. In addition, if a router is going to adapt to changes in the network, it must be prepared to remove old or unusable information from its routing table. How it determines what is old or unusable adds to the complexity of the routing protocol. Unfortunately, the better a protocol handles the various different situations in a network, the more complex it is likely to be. This complexity tends to lead to errors in the protocol's implementation, or differences in how vendors interpret the protocol.
In order to communicate information about the topology of the network, routers must periodically send messages to each other using a dynamic routing protocol. These messages must be sent across network segments just like any other packets. But unlike other packets in the network, these packets do not contain any information to or from a user. Instead, they contain information that is only useful to the routers. Thus, from the users' point of view, these packets are pure overhead. On a low-speed link, these messages can consume much of the available bandwidth, especially if the network is large or unstable.
some or all of the machines in a network may be unable to speak any dynamic routing protocol, or they may not speak a common protocol. If that is the case, static routing may be your only option.