Evolving from Legacy Protocols: Transitioning from RIP and EIGRP to OSPF, IS-IS and BGP

With the advent of the internet and growing complexity in the networking environment, old protocols like Routing Information Protocol (RIP) or Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) pose significant bottlenecks for modern businesses and service providers. This paper provides an overview on the evolution of RIP and EIGRP, its limitations as Interior Gateway Protocols (IGPs), the benefits of moving to newer and more powerful protocols such as Open Shortest path First (OSPF), Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The paper further dives deep into migration strategies from legacy protocols to OSPF or ISIS. OSPF and IS-IS are considered the best enterprise routing solutions and service provider routing solutions respectively due to their scalability, performance and flexibility. In addition, it highlights the importance of BGP as an external gateway protocol to control routing across autonomous systems. The findings aims to aid network engineers in making educated decisions on protocol implementation and migration efforts. Keywords— RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, Migration Strategies, Convergence time, Scalability.