Skip to content
Search

Routing

lastmod 2018-08-17created 2015-07-165 edits

Routing is the process of selecting the paths along which to send communication data within a network. Routing is used in many kinds of networks, such as telephone networks, electronic data networks (like the Internet), and transportation networks. This article mainly describes routing in electronic data networks that use packet switching technology.

In packet switching networks, routing directs packet forwarding and the conversion of logically addressed packets from their source toward their ultimate destination through intermediate nodes, typically called routers, bridges, gateways, firewalls, or switches. General-purpose computers with multiple network cards can also forward packets and perform routing, though they may be limited in performance because they are not specialized hardware. The routing process usually directs forwarding on the basis of routing tables, which maintain a record of routes to various network destinations. Therefore, constructing the routing tables held in the router's memory is very important for efficient routing. Most routing algorithms use only one network path at a time, but multipath routing techniques have enabled the use of multiple alternative paths.

In a narrower sense, routing is clearly distinguished from bridging by its assumption that network addresses are structured and that similar addresses imply proximity within the network. Because structured addresses allow a single routing table entry to represent the route to a group of devices, structured addressing (routing in the narrow sense) outperforms unstructured addressing (bridging) in large networks, and it has become the dominant form of addressing on the Internet, although bridging is still widely used within localized environments.

Routing schemes

See also

Favorite site

sitemap