Routing Basics
Once you create an internetwork by connecting your WANs and LANs to a router, you’ll need
to configure logical network addresses, such as IP addresses, to all hosts on the internetwork
so that they can communicate across that internetwork.
If your network has no routers, then it should be apparent that you are not routing. Routers
route traffic to all the networks in your internetwork. To be able to route packets, a router
must know, at a minimum, the following:
The destination address
The neighbor routers from which it can learn about remote networks
Possible routes to all remote networks
The best route to each remote network
How to maintain and verify routing information
The router learns about remote networks from neighbor routers or from an administrator.
The router then builds a
routing table
(a map of the internetwork) that describes how to find
the remote networks. If a network is directly connected, then the router already knows how
to get to it.
If a network isn’t directly connected to the router, the router must learn how to get to the
remote network in one of two ways: by using
static routing
, meaning someone must type all
network locations into the routing table, or by using something called
dynamic routing
.