Overview of Routers and Routing

Routers are devices that direct traffic between hosts. They build routing tables that contain collected information on all the best paths to all the destinations that they know how to reach. The steps for basic routing are as follows:

1.
Routers run programs referred to as routing protocols to both transmit and receive route information to and from other routers in the network.
2.
Routers use this information to populate routing tables that are associated with each particular routing protocol.
3.
Routers scan the routing tables from the different routing protocols (if more than one routing protocol is running) and select the best path(s) to each destination.
4.
Routers associate with ...

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