Routing and Networking Protocols

This section covers RouterOS routing and networking protocol guides, including routing decisions, policy routing, VRF, route filtering, BGP, OSPF, RIP, EVPN, MPLS, and migration from RouterOS v6 to v7. Use it to design and troubleshoot routed networks.

📄️Routing Decision

Routing decision in MikroTik RouterOS involves selecting paths for packet transmission using FIB and RIB tables, managing connected networks, default routes, and hardware offloading for efficient packet forwarding.

📄️Moving from ROSv6 to ROSv7

This page documents the transition from RouterOS v6 to v7, highlighting key changes such as increased routing table limits, new `/routing/table` and `/routing/rule` menus, improved route processing speed, and differences in policy routing. It includes examples for configuring custom routing tables, multi-WAN setups, and troubleshooting mangle rule conflicts.

📄️Routing Protocol Multi-core Support

RouterOS v7 enables multi-core routing by distributing tasks like FIB updates, BGP processing, and protocol handling across separate processes. Each sub-task uses private or shared memory, with BGP input/output affinity customizable via CLI. Memory usage and task status can be monitored using dedicated commands, enhancing performance on multi-core devices.

📄️Policy Routing

Policy routing in RouterOS allows steering traffic based on criteria to specific gateways, using custom routing tables and rules. It supports dynamic routing decisions with firewall mangle marking or basic routing rule configurations for traffic control.

📄️VRF

RouterOS enables creating multiple Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) instances for BGP-based MPLS VPNs, allowing separate routing tables and IP prefix isolation. VRF configurations are managed via the `/ip/vrf` menu, with routing table mappings created automatically. Each VRF supports up to 1024 instances and requires explicit service configuration for VRF-aware

🗃Unicast

7 items

🗃MPLS

4 items

🗃Multicast

3 items

📄️Route Distinguisher and Route Target

Route Distinguisher (RD) adds unique prefixes to customer addresses for VRF differentiation, while Route Targets control BGP routing information exchange between instances.

📄️Route Selection and Filtering

Route filtering in MikroTik RouterOS uses script-like syntax to match prefixes and modify routing distances based on conditions, with properties categorized as readable or readable/writable for matchers and actions.