Performance Evaluation of Secured versus Non-Secured EIGRP Routing Protocol

Routing is the process of forwarding data across an inter-network from a designated source to a final destination. Along the way from source to destination, at least one intermediate node is considered. Due to the major role that routing protocols play in computer network infrastructures, special cares have been given to routing protocols with built-in security constraints. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of EIGRP routing protocol in the case of secured and non-secured routing traffic. This is done through studying and analyzing EIGRP routing traffic with and without security rules. A network model of four Cisco routers, from both software and hardware perspectives, has been employed and a traffic generation and analysis tools have been developed and used to generate traffic data and to measure the delay for performance evaluation. The results show that the average delay in the secured case can become significantly larger than the unsecured case even in steady state conditions. The differences between the delays are exponential and reach a steady state towards the end of the experiment.