Interior Gateway Routing Protocol

(n.) Abbreviated as IGRP, a proprietary network protocol, developed by Cisco Systems, designed to work on autonomous systems. IGRP is a distance-vector routing protocol, which means that each router sends all or a portion of its routing table in a routing message update at regular intervals to each of its neighboring routers. A router chooses the best path between a source and a destination. Since each path can comprise many links, the system needs a way to compare the links in order to find the best path. A system such as RIP uses only one criteria — hops — to determine the best path. IGRP uses five criteria to determine the best path: the link’s speed, delay, packet size, loading and reliability. Network administrators can set the weighting factors for each of these metrics.