D-Link DGS-3308FG Product Manual - Page 63

8-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch User's Guide Consider, for example, a typical corporate intranet. Most use a hierarchy that consists of a high-speed backbone network with multiple routers each connecting the backbone to a workgroup, where each workgroup occupies a single LAN. Although the corporation can include dozens of workgroups, the span of the entire intranet is only 2. Even if each workgroup is extended to include a router that connects one or more additional LANs, the maximum span only increases to 4. Similarly, extending the hierarchy one more level only increases the span to 6. Thus, the limit that RIP imposes affects large autonomous systems or autonomous systems that do not have a hierarchical organization. Even in the best cases, however, hop counts provide only a crude measure of network capacity or responsiveness. Thus, using hop counts does not always yield routes with the least delay or highest capacity. Furthermore, computing routes on the basis of minimum hop counts has the severe disadvantage that it makes routing relatively static because routes cannot respond to changes in network load. 53