; in RIP, it is limited to 16 hops. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Transport Technologies Chapter 7 When RIP broadcasts information to other routers about the current state of the network, it broadcasts its entire routing table, resulting in a flood of what may be unnecessary traffic. As the Internet has grown, RIP has become relatively inefficient because it does not scale as well as it should in a large network. As a consequence the OSPF protocol was introduced. OSPF is known as a link state protocol. It converges (spreads important information across the network) faster than RIP, requires less overall bandwidth, and scales well in larger networks. OSPF-based routers only broadcast changes in status rather than the entire routing table. The BGP is referred to as an exterior gateway protocol because it is used for routing traffic between Internet domains. Like RIP, BGP is a dis- tance vector protocol, but unlike other distance vector protocols, BGP stores the actual route to the destination. The Not-So-Distant Future: IP Version 6 (IPv6) Because of the largely unanticipated growth of the Internet since 1993 or so (when the general public became aware of its existence), it was roundly concluded that IP version 4 was inadequate for the emerging and burgeoning needs of Internet applications. In 1995, IP version 6 (IPv6) was introduced, designed to deal with the shortcomings of version 4. Changes included increased IP address space from 32 to 128 bits, improved support for differentiable QoS requirements, and improve- ments with regard to security, confidentiality, and content integrity. IPv6 continues to be studied, and while it is in use, its pace of adoption is rel- atively slow. Its arrival is inevitable; however, the question is when. Transport Layer Protocols We turn our attention now to layer four, the transport layer. T