HSRP

Short for Hot Standby Routing Protocol, a proprietary protocol from Cisco. HSRP is a routing protocol that provides backup to a router in the event of failure. Using HSRP, several routers are connected to the same segment of an Ethernet, FDDI or token-ring network and work together to present the appearance of a single virtual router on the LAN. The routers share the same IP and MAC addresses, therefore in the event of failure of one router, the hosts on the LAN are able to continue forwarding packets to a consistent IP and MAC address. The process of transferring the routing responsibilities from one device to another is transparent to the user.