First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP)

Abstract

When a network is designed, the most important thing that is always kept in mind is the factor of availability. However, a lot of researchers are still working on managing and implementing more dependable networks are resilient to severe failovers and can cope up under immense traffic loads. With that being said, a lot of questions still need to be answered according to the financial and implementation point of view. Correspondingly, the current study aims at answering all these questions and providing with the best optimal solutions to deploy dependable networks primary aimed towards hardening and enforcing various techniques and protocols in the gateway router.[1] Gateway routers are of main concern because all the connectivity depends on them, if the gateway router goes down, the entire network goes down and becomes un-available. So, to address the specific issue, adding redundancy in the network was proposed and several vendors such as CISCO started working on them and came up with a couple of protocols that enable network redundancy and prevents failovers. Similarly, the current study is all about studying various aspects of these protocols and presenting with various optimal solutions around these protocols that are easily implementable and attainable. The current study would try to answer several questions regarding these protocols and their implementation. However, the main focus would be on these three primary protocols such as Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) and Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP).