• Routers automatically discover and maintain routes using routing protocols
• Routers exchange routing information with neighbouring routers
• The network adapts to topology changes without manual administrator intervention
• Routers establish neighbour adjacencies and exchange routing updates; each router builds and maintains its own routing table, and topology changes trigger a recalculation of the best paths

Benefits

• Automatic route discovery and redistribution capabilities
• Fault tolerance: alternate paths are activated when links fail
• Load balancing across multiple equal-cost paths (protocol-dependent)

Overhead

• CPU: routing protocol calculations (SPF, DUAL, path-vector decisions)
• Memory: routing table, topology table, and LSDB storage
• Bandwidth: periodic or triggered routing updates between neighbours