Router - How It Works

If you have been raised in the 21 th century, probably take a lot of things for granted that 30 years ago people did not. One of those things that is the Internet and its ability to be able to connect people from around the world and allow them to interact in a variety of ways, such as sending email, visit web sites, joining forums , attending online chats and countless other things. But none of this would be possible were it not for a device that most people have never seen and probably will not even know exist, called a router.

Routers are pieces of equipment that send messages to anyone connected to the network over a thousand different ways. We're going to take a behind the scenes to know exactly how these routers.

Let's say that you are sending an email to a friend who lives in the country or even in another part of the world. How do you know the e-mail address gets on a friend's computer instead of all the other millions of computers around the world? A good deal of work to get these messages from one computer to another is handled by routers. Rather than pass messages within networks, routers pass messages from one network to another.

To get an idea of ​​how this works, consider a simple example.

Say you have two departments. A department with 5 employees and Department of B with 5 employees. Let's say an employee of the Department A wants to send an email to Employee 3 at Department B. Each department is part of its computer network. A router connects two networks together so that they can communicate with each other. It 'the only piece of equipment that sees both networks. Many wonder, why not just do a network? The simple answer is that if the two departments do two completely different works for the company and send large amounts of information within the department, you do not want to delay another department with the information department. To facilitate what they call the "weight of traffic," the two departments are separated into two networks with a router to connect to each other only in case you want to communicate for some reason.

The way the router knows where to send what is what is called a configuration table. These configuration table consists of information on which connections lead to which addresses the priorities for each connection, and the rules for how to manage the flow of information between networks. The router then has two basic jobs. The main task is to ensure that the information does not go where it is needed so that the volume of data does not clog the network and the next task is to ensure that the information goes where it should go.

To simplify how this happens, the router examines the destination address of each packet sent from the source location. It checks the table to see where this address and sends each packet is at that address, bypassing all other addresses on the network so as not to slow the network down.

In future articles we'll look more in depth technical and how packets are routed in reality. Take your outfit to think about this ....