Overview

Routing in Networks: An Overview

Electronic networks are developed for creating and distributing information. The two most prominent and successful networks in existence are telephone networks and the Internet.

The telephone network interconnects more than a billion telephones worldwide. In the United States alone, the largest telephone company, AT and T, carries nearly 200 million calls every day. Besides voice, the network also carries video, facsimile, and telemetry data.

Every day, the World Wide Web grows by roughly a million electronic pages, adding to the hundreds of millions already in use. This staggering volume of information is loosely held together by more than a billion connections called

The process of finding a path from a source to every destination in the network is called routing. Routing is accomplished by means of routing protocols that establish mutually consistent routing tables in every router, or switch controller.