What does EIGRP Advertised Distance (AD) represent?

The Advertised Distance (AD) in EIGRP, which stands for Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol, represents the distance to a neighbor router. This metric is essentially the cost that EIGRP will advertise to its neighbors regarding how far away a particular network or destination is, based solely on the path through that neighbor.

When routers communicate with each other using EIGRP, they share their routing information, including this advertised distance. It helps routers make decisions about which route to take to reach a destination by comparing the advertised distances from different neighbors.

In the context of EIGRP, the advertised distance is different from the feasible distance (FD), which represents the best total path cost from the local router to a destination. Understanding the distinction between these distances is crucial for effective routing decisions in EIGRP.

Other choices refer to different aspects of routing metrics or characteristics. For instance, the total path cost to a destination relates to the cumulative cost of all segments along a path to that destination rather than just the distance to a neighbor. The best path metric in the routing table reflects the most optimal route decided by the routing algorithm, while the maximum link bandwidth available pertains to network capacity measures rather than distance metrics. This specificity in defining these terms helps