Higher in the Stack
Hardware and software have gradually become much more sophisticated since the appearance of the first routers. Several years ago, hardware vendors began to notice the benefits of forwarding and filtering at higher levels of the protocol stack.
As you learned in Hours 2 through 7, each layer of the stack offers different services and encodes different information in its header. A router with access to higher layers of the stack has additional information on which to base its decisions. For instance, a router that sees the Transport layer could form inferences on the nature of the data based on knowledge of the source and destination port. A router that sees the Application layer would have even more complete knowledge of the ...
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