What feature helps improve scalability in routing protocols?

Route aggregation is a feature that significantly enhances scalability in routing protocols by allowing multiple contiguous IP address ranges to be represented as a single, summarized route. This practice minimizes the size of the routing table, leading to more efficient memory use and quicker convergence times.

When a router receives updates from different routes that can be summarized, it can announce just the summarized address to its neighbors instead of each individual route. This reduces the amount of routing information that needs to be processed and stored, making it less demanding on router resources as the network grows.

In larger networks, if each subnet or route was advertised separately, routers would quickly become overwhelmed with information, slowing down their performance and potentially leading to routing loops or incorrect routing decisions. Route aggregation streamlines this process, allowing routers to manage and direct traffic more effectively, even as the network expands.