Understanding dynamic routing

Let's imagine you're the network engineer for a very large organization that has a lot of subnets spanning across multiple remote offices, which are all interconnected by routers. Manually implementing static routes to each network can be a very daunting task. Imagine that there is a failure on the network; routers will not automatically discover a new path and re-route network traffic. Furthermore, as the network engineer, your job gets tougher when there are issues on the network as static routing becomes more difficult to troubleshoot as the network expands.

To save the day, there are dynamic routing protocols. What exactly are dynamic routing protocols? The answer to this question is quite simple: they are layer 3 routing protocols that can be configured on a router to automatically discover remote networks, maintain and update routing tables, and calculate the best path to a destination network. In the event a route or path is no longer...