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If the postman sitting in the center of the United States received letters from San Francisco, he would find that letters from San Francisco arriving from channels to the west would come in with later cancellation dates than if such letters had arrived in a roundabout manner from the east. Each letter carries an implicit indication of its length of transmission path. The astute postman can then deduce that the best channel to send a message to San Francisco is probably the link associated with the latest cancellation dates of messages from San Francisco. – Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications, Volume I, 1964. |
While IGP protocols are used within local networks, Exterior Gateway Protocols (EGP) are used for routing between networks, generally on the Internet backbone itself, linking the different networks together. The following sections provide more information on the two common EGP protocols: