Abstract
Network availability is a key consideration in disaster planning, but it also has critical impacts on everyday life and work. For organizations, network downtime or sluggishness equates to business downtime, at considerable cost to organizations through inefficiency, lost sales, lack of critical data for decisions, and other harmful effects. First hop redundancy protocols (FHRP) are an essential tool for improving the availability of IP networks. In this paper, we evaluate the three particular protocols of FHRPs, namely the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRPv6), Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRPv3), and Gateway Load Balancing (GLBPv6) using GNS3 tools. The First Hop Redundancy Protocols have been implemented, tested, optimized, and compared to one another in terms of CPU Utilization, Traffic flow, packet loss and convergence time. The comparison indicates which protocol is best in which scenario and which is best among the three protocols.