How Routers Work
Dr. Wesam S. Bhaya
IT College
Information Networks Department
Routers are the traffic cops of the Internet.
They ensure that all data gets sent to where
it's supposed to go via the most efficient
route. When you connect to the Internet and
send or receive data, the information must
go through at least one router and often
more than one router before it reaches its
final destination.
Routers open the IP packets of data to
read the destination address,
calculate the best route, and then
send the packet toward its final destination.
If the destination is on the same router, the
router sends the packet directly to the
destination computer.
If the packet is going to a destination far from
current router, the router sends the packet to
another router closer to the destination.
That router in turn sends the packet to a yet-
closer router, and so on, until the packet
reaches its final destination.
When routers determine the next router to
receive packets, factors such as traffic
congestion and the number of hops (routers
or gateways on any given path) come into
play. The IP packet carries a segment that
holds the maximum hop counts it can travel,
and a router will not use a path that would
exceed that predefined number of hops.
Routers have two or more physical ports: receiving
(input) ports and sending (output) ports. When an
input port receives a packet, a software routine
called a routing process is run. This process looks
inside the header information in the IP packet and
finds the address to which the data is being sent. It
then compares this address against an internal
database called a routing table. The routing table
has detailed information about the ports to which
packets with various IP addresses should be sent.
Based on what it finds in the routing table, the
router sends the packet to a specific output port.
This output port then sends the data to the next
router or to the destination itself.
There are two kinds of routing tables: static
routing tables and dynamic routing
tables. The static table is simpler, and
specifies specific paths for packets to use to
get to their final destination. The dynamic
table allows a packet to have multiple
routes to get to its destination.
At times, packets are sent to a router's input
port faster than the port can process them.
When this happens, the packets are sent to a
special holding area called an input queue,
which is an area of RAM on the router. That
specific input queue is associated with a
specific input port. A router can have more
than one input queue. Each input port
processes packets from the queue in the
order in which they were received, so the
first packets sent in are the first to get
processed and sent out.
If the number of packets received exceeds the
capacity of the queue (called the length of
the queue), packets might be lost. When this
occurs, the TCP protocol on the sending and
receiving computers have the packets re-
sent.