Routing protocols play a vital role in the modern internet era. A routing protocol determines how the routers communicate with each other by sending update packets about the routes which are directly connected to it. A routing protocol also chooses an optimal path for the packets when a number of routes exist between the source node and the destination node. An efficient routing protocol forwards router update packets from a source node to a destination node through an optimal path and also does not send many routing update packets but still maintaining the convergence of the network. In this paper we have explored two eminent protocols namely, Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocols. Evaluation of these routing protocols was performed on a live network. Factors such the such as Convergence Time, Jitter, End-to-End delay, Throughput and Packet Loss were measured . The evaluation results show that EIGRP routing protocol provides a better performance than OSPF routing protocol for real time applications. Through experiments we have obtained the clock cycles of the router's CPU when it is running on EIGRP and OSPF. By expressing the power consumed by the router as a function of frequency and voltage we are able to state that the router consumes lesser power when running on EIGRP than when it runs on OSPF. Hence EIGRP is a greener routing protocol when compared to OSPF.

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