Routing

Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network, electronic data networks (such as the Internet), and transportation (transport) networks. This article is concerned primarily with routing in electronic data networks using packet switching technology.

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