Detection of routing loops

In case of a link failure a routing algorithm can reorganize a network and keep it full functional if there are redundant links available. Redundant links are only available in a network system like the Internet if the topology contains loops. However, topology loops are also the main reason for the occurrence of routing loops. A routing loop can be seen as a circular trace of a routing update information which returns to the same router, either directly from the neighbor router or via a loop topology. It is necessary to recognize and to prevent routing loops because they consume a large amount of network bandwidth and impact the end-to-end performance of the network. We introduce a new routing algorithm which can detect routing loops just by the evaluation of simple routing metrics. Our new algorithm is called routing information protocol with metric based topology investigation (RIP-MTI), which is a straightforward extension to the routing information protocol (RIP) and is entirely compatible to RIP.