The Lazy Networker

Features of RIPv1
It is a universal protocol.
Administrative Distance is 120.
Hop count is used as the metric for path selection.
The maximum hop count is 15, so it supports maximum 16 routers per interface.
Routing updates are broadcast every 30 seconds by default. Because it is a distance vector routing protocol, updates are sent even if no change has occurred.
It uses Bellman ford algorithm for path selection.
RIP can load balance over as many as 16 equal-cost paths (4 paths by default).
It has no authentication support.

It has two versions

RIPv1 is a classful distance vector routing protocol described in RFC 1058 that does not send the subnet mask in its updates.Therefore, RIPv1 does not support VLSM or discontiguous subnets. RIPv1 automatically summarizes at the network boundary and cannot be configured not to.

RIPv2 is a classless distance vector routing protocol defined in RFC 1721, RIP Version 2 Protocol Analysis; RFC 1722, RIP Version 2 Protocol Applicability Statement; and RFC 2453, RIP Version 2. The most significant addition to RIPv2 is the inclusion of the mask in the RIPv2 routing update packet, allowing RIPv2 to support VLSM and discontiguous subnets. RIPv2 automatically summarizes routes on classful network boundaries. As described earlier, however, you can disable this behavior. In addition, RIPv2 uses multicast addressing for more-efficient periodic updating on each interface. RIPv2 uses the 224.0.0.9 multicast address to advertise to other RIPv2 routers. This approach is more efficient than RIPv1’s approach. RIPv1 uses a 255.255.255.255 broadcast address, so all devices, including PCs and servers, must process the update packet. They perform the checksum on the Layer 2 packet and pass it up their IP stack. IP sends the packet to the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) process, and UDP checks to see whether RIP port 520 is available. Most PCs and servers do not have any process running on this port and discard the packet.