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Routing (or routeing) is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send data or physical traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network, the Internet, and transport networks.

Routing directs forwarding, the passing of logically addressed packets from their source toward their ultimate destination through intermediary 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 with more 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.

Routing, in a more narrow sense of the term, is often contrasted with bridging in its assumption that network addresses are structured and that similar addresses imply proximity within the network. Because structured addresses allow a single routing table entry to represent the route to a group of devices, structured addressing (routing, in the narrow sense) outperforms unstructured addressing (bridging) in large networks, and has become the dominant form of addressing on the Internet, though bridging is still widely used, albeit within localized environments.

Contents 1 Delivery semantics 2 Topology distribution 2.1 Distance vector algorithms 2.2 Link-state algorithms 2.3 Path vector protocol 2.4 Comparison of routing algorithms 3 Path selection 4 Multiple agents 5 See also 5.1 Routing algorithms and techniques 5.2 Routing in specific networks 5.3 Routing protocols 5.4 Switching schemes (orthogonal to routing) 6 References 7 External links

Routing Schemes
anycast
broadcast
multicast
unicast

Routing schemes differ in their delivery semantics:

• unicast delivers a message to a single specified node;
• broadcast delivers a message to all nodes in the network;
• multicast delivers a message to a group of nodes that have expressed interest in receiving the message;
• anycast delivers a message to any one out of a group of nodes, typically the one nearest to the source.

Unicast is the dominant form of message delivery on the Internet, and this article focuses on unicast routing algorithms.

Small networks may involve manually configured routing tables, while larger networks involve complex topologies and may change rapidly, making the manual construction of routing tables infeasible. Nevertheless, most of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) uses pre-computed routing tables, with fallback routes if the most direct route becomes blocked; see routing in the PSTN. Dynamic routing attempts to solve this problem by constructing routing tables automatically, based on information carried by routing protocols, and allowing the network to act nearly autonomously in avoiding network failures and blockages.

Dynamic routing dominates the Internet. However, the configuration of the routing protocols often requires a skilled touch; one should not suppose that networking technology has developed to the point of the complete automation of routing.

Main article: Distance-vector routing protocol

Distance vector algorithms use the Bellman-Ford algorithm. This approach assigns a number, the cost, to each of the links between each node in the network. Nodes will send information from point A to point B via the path that results in the lowest total cost (i.e. the sum of the costs of the links between the nodes used).

The algorithm operates in a very simple manner. When a node first starts, it only knows of its immediate neighbours, and the direct cost involved in reaching them. (This information, the list of destinations, the total cost to each, and the next hop to send data to get there, makes up the routing table, or distance table.) Each node, on a regular basis, sends to each neighbour its own current idea of the total cost to get to all the destinations it knows of. The neighbouring node(s) examine this information, and compare it to what they already 'know'; anything which represents an improvement on what they already have, they insert in their own routing table(s). Over time, all the nodes in the network will discover the best next hop for all destinations, and the best total cost.

When one of the nodes involved goes down, those nodes which used it as their next hop for certain destinations discard those entries, and create new routing-table information. They then pass this information to all adjacent nodes, which then repeat the process. Eventually all the nodes in the network receive the updated information, and will then discover new paths to all the destinations which they can still "reach".

There are however some disadvantages of the distance vector algorithm which are important to note. In environments which are completely static, distance vector algorithms propagate routing information to all destinations. If a new connection appears or an old connection fails, information propagates slowly from one router to another. This problem which is called slow convergence or counting to infinity, creates inconsistencies in the environment. In order to combat this problem, the span of the network should be limited. RIP (Routing Information Protocol) limits the span to 16. The span of a network is the maximum distance across. By limiting the "infinity" or span of a network, slow convergence is limited but not eliminated. Another important disadvantage is the fact that distance vector algorithms require the exchange of very large messages. Each routing update contains an entry for every possible network. As a result the size of the message is proportional with the total number of networks within an internet. Because the distance-vector algorithm requires every router to participate, the amount of information can be enormous.

Main article: Link-state routing protocol

When applying link-state algorithms, each node uses as its fundamental data a map of the network in the form of a graph. To produce this, each node floods the entire network with information about what other nodes it can connect to, and each node then independently assembles this information into a map. Using this map, each router then independently determines the least-cost path from itself to every other node using a standard shortest paths algorithm such as Dijkstra's algorithm. The result is a tree rooted at the current node such that the path through the tree from the root to any other node is the least-cost path to that node. This tree then serves to construct the routing table, which specifies the best next hop to get from the current node to any other node.

Main article: Path vector protocol

Distance vector and link state routing are both intra-domain routing protocols. They are used inside an autonomous system, but not between autonomous systems. Both of these routing protocols become intractable in large networks and cannot be used in Inter-domain routing. Distance vector routing is subject to instability if there are more than few hops in the domain. Link state routing needs huge amount of resources to calculate routing tables. It also creates heavy traffic because of flooding.

Path vector routing is used for inter-domain routing. It is similar to Distance vector routing. In path vector routing we assume there is one node (there can be many) in each autonomous system which acts on behalf of the entire autonomous system. This node is called the speaker node. The speaker node creates a routing table and advertises it to neighboring speaker nodes in neighboring autonomous systems. The idea is the same as Distance vector routing except that only speaker nodes in each autonomous system can communicate with each other. The speaker node advertises the path, not the metric of the nodes, in its autonomous system or other autonomous systems.

Distance-vector routing protocols are simple and efficient in small networks, and require little, if any management. However, naïve distance-vector algorithms do not scale well (due to the count-to-infinity problem [1]), and have poor convergence properties.

This has led to the development of more complex but more scalable algorithms for use in large networks. Interior routing mostly uses link-state routing protocols such as OSPF and IS-IS.

A more recent development is that of loop-free distance-vector protocols (e.g. EIGRP). Loop-free distance-vector protocols are as robust and manageable as distance-vector protocols, while avoiding counting to infinity and hence having good worst-case convergence times.

A routing metric is a value used by a routing algorithm to determine whether one route should perform better than another. Metrics can cover such information as bandwidth, delay, hop count, path cost, load, MTU, reliability, and communication cost. The routing table stores only the best possible routes, while link-state or topological databases may store all other information as well.

As a routing metric is specific to a given routing protocol, multi-protocol routers must use some external heuristic in order to select between routes learned from different routing protocols. Cisco's routers, for example, attribute a value known as the administrative distance to each route, where smaller administrative distances indicate routes learned from a supposedly more reliable protocol.

A local network administrator, in special cases, can setup host-specific routes to a particular machine which provides more control over network usage, permits testing and better overall security. This can come in handy when required to debug network connections or routing tables.

In some networks, routing is complicated by the fact that no single entity is responsible for selecting paths: instead, multiple entities are involved in selecting paths or even parts of a single path. Complications or inefficiency can result if these entities choose paths to selfishly optimize their own objectives, which may conflict with the objectives of other participants.

A classic example involves traffic in a road system, in which each driver selfishly picks a path which minimizes her own travel time. With such selfish routing, the equilibrium routes can be longer than optimal for all drivers. In particular, Braess' paradox shows that adding a new road can lengthen travel times for all drivers.

The Internet is partitioned into autonomous systems (ASs) such as internet service providers (ISPs), each of which has control over routes involving its network, at multiple levels. First, AS-level paths are selected via the BGP protocol, which produces a sequence of ASs through which packets will flow. Each AS may have multiple paths, offered by neighboring ASs, from which to choose. Its decision often involves business relationships with these neighboring ASs,^[1] which may be unrelated to path quality or latency. Second, once an AS-level path has been selected, there are often multiple corresponding router-level paths, in part because two ISPs may be connected in multiple locations. In choosing the single router-level path, it is common practice for each ISP to employ hot-potato routing: sending traffic along the path that minimizes the distance through the ISP's own network—even if that path lengthens the total distance to the destination.

Consider two ISPs, A and B, which each have a presence in New York, connected by a fast link with latency 5 ms; and which each have a presence in London connected by a 5 ms link. Suppose both ISPs have trans-Atlantic links connecting their two networks, but A's link has latency 100 ms and B's has latency 120 ms. When routing a message from a source in A's London network to a destination in B's New York network, A may choose to immediately send the message to B in London. This saves A the work of sending it along an expensive trans-Atlantic link, but causes the message to experience latency 125 ms when the other route would have been 20 ms faster.

A 2003 measurement study of Internet routes found that, between pairs of neighboring ISPs, more than 30% of paths have inflated latency due to hot potato routing, with 5% of paths being delayed by at least 12 ms. Inflation due to AS-level path selection, while substantial, was attributed primarily to BGP's lack of a mechanism to directly optimize for latency, rather than to selfish routing policies. It was also suggested that, were an appropriate mechanism in place, ISPs would be willing to cooperate to reduce latency rather than use hot-potato routing.^[2]

• Adaptive routing
• Alternative-path routing
• Deflection routing
• Edge Disjoint Shortest Pair Algorithm
• Dijkstra's Algorithm
• Fuzzy routing
• Geographic routing
• Hierarchical routing
• Multi-path routing
• Overlay network routing schemes
  • Key based routing (KBR)
  • Decentralized object location and routing (DOLR)
  • Group anycast and multicast (CAST)
  • Distributed hash table (DHT)
• Policy-based routing
• Quality of Service in routing
• Static routing
• Backward learning routing

• Route assignment in transportation networks
• National Routeing Guide: passenger routing in the UK rail network
• Routing in the PSTN

• Routing protocol
• Classless inter-domain routing (CIDR)
• MPLS routing
• ATM routing
• RPSL

• Wormhole routing
• cut through
• store and forward

• Ash, Gerald (1997). Dynamic Routing in Telecommunication Networks. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070064148. 
• Doyle, Jeff and Carroll, Jennifer (2005). Routing TCP/IP, Volume I, Second Ed.. Cisco Press. ISBN 1587052024. Ciscopress ISBN 1587052024
• Doyle, Jeff and Carroll, Jennifer (2001). Routing TCP/IP, Volume II,. Cisco Press. ISBN 1578700892. Ciscopress ISBN 1578700892
• Huitema, Christian (2000). Routing in the Internet, Second Ed.. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0321227352. 
• Kurose, James E. and Ross, Keith W. (2004). Computer Networking, Third Ed.. Benjamin/Cummings. ISBN 0321227352. 
• Medhi, Deepankar and Ramasamy, Karthikeyan (2007). Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 0120885883. 

• Count-To-Infinity Problem
• "Stability Features" are ways of avoiding the "count to infinity" problem.
• Cisco IT Case Studies about Routing and Switching