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IGRP was created in part to overcome the limitations of RIP (maximum hop count, and a single routing metric) when used within large networks. IGRP supports multiple metrics for each route, including bandwidth, load, delay, and relability; to compare two routes these metrics are combined together into a single metric, using a formula which can be adjusted through the use of pre-set constants. The maximum hop count of IGRP-routed packets is 255.
Its successor is EIGRP, a hybrid routing protocol that adds Diffusing Update Algorithm (DUAL) ideas to the basic distance-vector mechanism of IGRP.