Determine the best pathThis part of the site is giving you an overall sight on some of the most interesting parts of routing technology. On the other hand, there are so many interesting things about routing technology these days that I simply don’t have time to write all that stuff at once. That is why there is also stuff that is missing here on the list but there will be more articles added in the future.  Here we will not go in deep because this is only the intro site to the routing articles. Some entry-level information about routing will though be written here so there will be no need to expand the story about simple stuff in the next articles down below.

Let’s start: Routing

If you have two different networks. Let’s say you are still on IPv4 and one network is using 192.168.0.0/24 and other 172.16.1.0/24 subnet. The process of sending some communication from one network to the other is called routing. If the story is true and you are using the IPv4, this alone is giving you the information that you are in use of IP protocol for addressing your nodes in the network. Internet-Protocol is the protocol who encompasses routing inside. At least when it comes to our networks today. Todays networks are TCP/IP-based networks and that means that the transmission of the packets is made using Transmission Control Protocol – TCP and IP – Internet Protocol. IP in that case is the part of TCP/IP who is managing data sorting and delivery.

After this short paragraph we can shortly say: Routing is the main function of the IP protocol.

When some data is ready to be sent from on computer to another the IP layer of the network stack is creating little pieces of that data that are inserted into small envelopes and in that envelopes is also added source and destination IP address which will be used to route that envelope with data through the network.

Each IP datagram is in our example described as envelope containing data and a source and destination IP address. When that envelope goes through the network each network node (router) examines the destination address that is found inside and compares that address to his locally maintained routing table. Based on the info in that table, router knows where to send the envelope out to deliver it closer to the destination. Or hopefully to the network directly attached.

That’s the minimum about traffic flow in today’s networking world. For more info on some of the specific technology in the routing world, please consult some of the articles listed below. I hope you will find this technologies interesting at least as much as I did.

 

Routing articles: