Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP)

Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) is a unique Cisco innovation. Highly valued for its ease of deployment and fast convergence, EIGRP is commonly used in many large Enterprise networks. EIGRP maintains all of the advantages of distance-vector protocols, while avoiding the concurrent disadvantages.

EIGRP is a simple protocol to understand and deploy. It's IPv6-ready, scales effectively in a well-designed network, and provides extremely quick convergence times. Other EIGRP advantages include:

• Easy transition to IPv6 with multi-address family support for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
• Superior scaling of Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) for large dynamic multipoint (DM) VPN deployments
• Very fast rapid convergence times for changes in the network topology
• Only routing table changes, not the entire routing table, are propagated, when a change occurs
• More efficient use of links, through equal cost multipath (ECMP) and unequal cost load sharing

EIGRP is an enhanced distance-vector protocol, relying on the Diffused Update Algorithm (DUAL) to calculate the shortest path to a network.

Featured Content

WAN Virtualization using OTP TechAdvantage Webinar
December 4, 2013
Watch the replay and download the slides and read the white paper.

EIGRP Implementation
How Cisco IT simplified network growth with EIGRP.
IT Case Study (PDF - 203 KB)

Read the IETF Draft: Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol

Cisco Tech Talk Series: EIGRP Routing Innovations
Watch the replay and download the slides

Packet Pushers Podcast: Listen to show 144 "Open EIGRP With Russ White + Cisco's Donnie Savage" (Podcast 42:29)

Technical Support and Documentation

Review additional information about Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) in the Technical Support site area.

Product Literature