Abstract
High levels of availability can be expensive to maintain, but a lack of availability may also increase costs as it may damage the reputation of the business. This has led to the development of techniques that reduce downtime until it became transparent to the user. First hop redundancy protocols are an essential tool for improving the availability of IP networks. First hop redundancy protocols are protocols used to manage and maintain network default gateway router by using one or more redundant routers that will take over in case of default router failure. In this paper, we evaluate the three particular protocols of FHRPs, namely the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), and Gateway Load Balancing (GLBP) using GNS3 tools. The First Hop Redundancy Protocols have been implemented, tested, optimized, and compared to one another in terms of convergence time, packet loss and CPU utilization. The comparison indicates which protocol is best in which scenario and which is best among the three protocols.