A Performance Comparison of MD5 Authenticated Routing Traffic with EIGRP, RIPv2, and OSPF

Routing is the process of forwarding data across an inter-network from a designated source to a final destination. Along the way from source to destination, at least one intermediate node is considered. Due to the major role that routingprotocols play in computer network infrastructures, special cares have been given to routing protocols with built-in securityconstraints. In this paper, we conduct performance evaluation comparisons on message digest 5 authenticated routing trafficwith respect to EIGRP, RIPv2 and OSPF protocols. A network model of four Cisco routers has been employed with anON/OFF traffic model used to describe text files transmissions over the network. Eventually, analysis tool has been developedand used to measure the average delay time and average jitter. The collected results show that the average delay time andjitter in the secured message digest 5 case can become significantly larger when compared to the non-secured case even insteady state conditions. Among all, the secured OSPF protocol shows the highest performance even when the system isextremely overloaded