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A routing protocol specifies how routers communicate and share information about the topology of the network, and the capabilities of each routing node. Different protocols are often used for different topologies or different application areas. For example, the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol is generally used within an enterprise and ...
The routing process usually directs forwarding on the basis of routing tables. Routing tables maintain a record of the routes to various network destinations. Routing tables may be specified by an administrator, learned by observing network traffic or built with the assistance of routing protocols. Routing, in a narrower sense of the term ...
Control plane: A router maintains a routing table that lists which route should be used to forward a data packet, and through which physical interface connection. It does this using internal pre-configured directives, called static routes, or by learning routes dynamically using a routing protocol. Static and dynamic routes are stored in the ...
Routing protocols, according to the OSI routing framework, are layer management protocols for the network layer, regardless of their transport mechanism: IS-IS runs on the data link layer (Layer 2) Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is encapsulated in IP, but runs only on the IPv4 subnet, while the IPv6 version runs on the link using only link ...
Since a forwarding decision must be made for every packet handled by a node, the total time required for this can become a major limiting factor in overall network performance. Much of the design effort of high-speed routers and switches has been focused on making rapid forwarding decisions for large numbers of packets.
Indeed, transit routers typically need only to examine the topmost label on the stack. The forwarding of the packet is done based on the contents of the labels, which allows protocol-independent packet forwarding that does not need to look at a protocol-dependent routing table and avoids the expensive IP longest prefix match at each hop.
Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.
In a typical deployment, customer edge (CE) routers handle local routing in a traditional fashion and disseminate routing information into the provider edge (PE) where the routing tables are virtualized. The PE router then encapsulates the traffic, marks it to identify the VRF instance, and transmits it across the provider backbone network to ...