Introduction
The use of a routing protocol to advertise routes that are learned by some other means, such as by another routing protocol, static routes, or directly connected routes, is called redistribution. While running a single routing protocol throughout your entire IP internetwork is desirable, multi-protocol routing is common for a number of reasons, such as company mergers, multiple departments managed by multiple network administrators, and multi-vendor environments. Running different routing protocols is often part of a network design. In any case, having a multiple protocol environment makes redistribution a necessity.
Differences in routing protocol characteristics, such as metrics, administrative distance, classful and classless capabilities can effect redistribution. Consideration must be given to these differences for redistribution to succeed.
Metrics
When you redistribute one protocol into another, remember that the metrics of each protocol play an important role in redistribution. Each protocol uses different metrics. For example, the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) metric is based on hop count, but Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) and Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) use a composite metric based on bandwidth, delay, reliability, load, and maximum transmission unit (MTU), where bandwidth and delay are the only parameters used by default. When routes are redistributed, you must define a metric that is understandable to the receiving protocol. There are two methods to define metrics when redistributing routes.
