Routing Concepts and Distance Vector Protocols (Source: Network Professional's Advaned Internetworking Guide, John Wiley Publications)

The routing process gives a router its abilities, from the most basic (a broadcast domain boundary) all the way through its most advanced routing protocol interaction (a gateway to the Internet and the world). Of course, there are rules to be followed and information that routers must have to make this happen. Important are the ways to filter and control the propagation of routing information between routers and routing domains. Routing Fundamentals Basic Routing: Routers just need to know which networks they are to reach to. If there is no entry for the network a packet is destined to, the packet is simply dropped. So, here is a matter of maintaining and updating the routing table too. Directly connected networks: a router always knows about the directly connected networks as long as they are up and enabled; they show up in the routing table as directly connected. Understanding TCP/IP An architectural model is for reference. The layers in it correspond to a function is communication of data; any number of protocols might be doing it as the communication function might be serviced by specific protocols. Every protocol communicates with its peerthe implementation of same protocol on a remote computer. Theoretically the layers/protocols tend to be independent, but dependency exists as the upper layers rely on lowers and hence there has to be an agreement on the way data transmission is going to occur. At the remote end, the data is passed up the stack to the receiving application. The individual layers do not need to know how the l ayers above or below them function; they only need to know how to pass data to them. Each layer adds control information in form of headers/trailers to ensure proper delivery of data to the peer. When a protocol uses headers or trailers to package the data from another protocol, the process is called encapsulation. An address mechanism is the common element that allows data to be routed through the various layers until it reaches its destination. Data Structures of Layers: Each layer also has its own independent data structures. Conceptually, a layer is unaware of the data structures used by the layers above and below it. In reality, the data structures of a layer are designed to be compatible with the structures used by the surrounding layers for the sake of more efficient data transmission. Still, each layer has its own data structures and its own terminology to describe those structures. Network Access Layer(DoD): the network access layer protocols must understand the details of the underlying physical network, such as the packet structure, maximum frame size, and the physical address scheme that is used--ensures that these protocols can format the data correctly so that it can be transmitted across the network. Routinggateway vs Router: Two types of devices are responsible for routing messages between networks. The first device is called a gateway: a computer that has two network adapter cards. This computer accepts network packets from one network on one network card and routes those packets to a different network via the second network adapter card. The second device is a router, which is a dedicated hardware device that passes packets

from one network to a different network. Datagram Service: does not support any concept of a session or connection. Once a message is sent or received, the service retains no memory of the entity with which it was communicating. If such a memory is needed, the protocols in the host-to-host transport layer maintain it. The abilities to retransmit data and check it for errors are minimal or nonexistent in the datagram services. If the receiving datagram service detects a transmission error during transmission using the checksum value of the datagram, it simply ignores (or drops) the datagram without notifying the receiving higher-layer entity. Host-to-host Transport Layer: In addition to the usual transmit and receive functions, the layer uses open and close commands to initiate and terminate the connection. This layer accepts information to be transmitted as a stream of characters, and it returns information to the recipient as a stream. The service employs the concept of a connection (or virtual circuit). A connection is the state of the host-to-host transport layer between the time that an open command is accepted by the receiving computer and the time that the close command is issued by either computer. Sessions and Ports: The application layer manages the sessions (connections) between cooperating applications. In the TCP/IP protocol hierarchy, sessions are not identifiable as a separate layer, and these functions are performed by the host-to-host transport layer. Instead of using the term session, TCP/IP uses the terms socket and port to describe the path (or virtual circuit) over which cooperating applications communicate. The application layer is responsible for standardizing the presentation of data. NDIS drivers in the Windows NT environment, the programs(modules) which are identified with the name of physical interface do the task of encapsulation and sending frames to the link. Related programs do the rest, e.g. address mapping and all. All TCP/IP data flows through IP when it is sent and received, regardless of its final destination. IPpacket switched connection-less protocol: A packet switching network uses the addressing information in the packets to switch packets from one physical network to another, moving them toward their final destination. Each packet travels the network independently of any other packet. Gateways and routers are devices that switch packets between the different physical networks. Deciding which gateway to use is called routing. IP makes the routing decision for each individual packet. Each host-to-host transport layer protocol has a unique protocol number that identifies it to IP. In traditional TCP/IP jargon, there are only two types of network devices: 1. Gateways and 2. Hosts. Usually, Gateways forward packets between networks and hosts don't. But, a multi-homed host(a host is connected to more than one network), it can forward packets between the networks. When a multi-homed host forwards packets, it acts like any other gateway and is considered to be a gateway. Each network has a Maximum Transfer Unit(MTU) which is the largest packet size it can transmit. When packet size has to be more than its limit(eg the case when two networks of different MTU sizes interface), there has to be fragmentation. Internet Control Message Protocol(ICMP): This is connection-less(Datagram delivery

service of IP) and yet tries to ensure the robustness of link for connection-less-ness(Well, so to speak). Each specific protocol has a definite set of questions which are often answered in a specific way.. The development of protocols in computing has been exactly according to what one needs to know. ICMP implements: Flow Control: by sending back a source quench message which(an intermediate gateway too might send) is obviously interpretted only by ICMP running host when the machine senses too much packets being received and buffer about to run out. Destination Unreachable: When a destination is unreachable, the computer detecting the problem sends a destination unreachable message to the datagrams source. If the unreachable destination is a network or host, the message is sent by an intermediate gateway. But if the destination is an unreachable port, the destination host sends the message. Route Redirect: The complication is that a Redirect message must be tied to a particular, existing connection; it cannot be used to make an unsolicited change to the hosts routing tables. Furthermore, Redirects are only applicable within a limited topology; they may be sent only from the first gateway along the path to the originating host. A later gateway may not advise that host, nor may it use ICMP Redirect to control other gateways. Both TCP and UDP deliver data between the application layer and the internetwork layer. Applications programmers can choose the service that is most appropriate for their specific applications. UDP is an unreliable, connectionless datagram protocol. Unreliable merely means that the protocol has no technique for verifying that the data reached the other end of the network correctly. Within your computer, UDP will deliver data correctly. TCP is a reliable, connection-oriented, byte-stream protocol. HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Supports the low-overhead transport of files consisting of a mixture of text and graphics. It uses a stateless, connection- and object-oriented protocol with simple commands that support selection and transport of objects between the client and the server. This is about how router decides where to route data and ways to gather the information required in order to accomplish this very motive. Routers care only about networks when they are routing, not about individual host IP addresses. Every router must know about every destination network to which it can send data. If a router has a packet to route but the destination network is not in its routing table, then the packet will be dropped(Scenario I). The information that a router needs to route are: Destination address Possible routes to all remote networks The best route or path to a destination network Neighbor routers from which it can learn routes and send data A way to learn, update, and maintain route information All the interfaces of the router show up in the routing table themselves if up/enabled/active and have directly connected written with them. Scenario of PC in one Broadcast domain on a Router pinging a machine in Another: PC1 creates an Internet control message protocol (ICMP) packet, frames it at the data link layer, and then sends the frames across the network to the router. At the data link layer, the destination address is the router because it is default gateway for BrusPC1 and the packet is destined for a remote network. Once the frame reaches the router, the router tears off the frame and looks into the IP packet header. It needs the destination IP address for the route lookup. The router finds that the destination network is 10.10.40.0/24. Looking at the routing table of BrusRtr1

you can see where the packet is going to go. After the router has determined that the packet will go out to interface fa0/3, it must switch the packet from incoming interface of fa0/0. Now that the packet is on the outgoing interface, it must be passed back down to Layer 2. Routing and SwitchingWell, as far as terms are considered wrt actual processes inside devices: The routing process makes the decision about where the packet has to be sent to move along the path to the destination. The process that actually moves the packet from one interface to another is switching. A switch moves or switches frames at Layer 2, while a router switches packets at Layer 3. In both cases, a chunk of data is being moved from one interface to another, but the difference is the type of data and at what layer the exchange occurs. Switching is always this process of moving data from one interface to another, whether it happens at Layer 2, 3, or 4. Administrative Distance: if the router is getting information from multiple sources, you have to give the router a way to determine which source of information is best because every single routing protocol uses different information (called a metric) to determine its own best path to networks. A router has no way of equally balancing or comparing the routes that it receives from different protocolsit is always going to work on only one route update at a time. This means that you need to assign a weight or value to every type of routing information that a router may receive. This value or scale is called administrative distance. The lower the number in the administrative distance scale, the better the informaion is to the router. An individual router always knows about directly connected networks and for that reason, they are the best; the AD is 0. Static routes have AD 1, EIGRP Summary Route has AD 5. Rest are below.

Static Routing: You can also use static routes to help chose a backup path when a primary fails. This is called a floating static route. Static routing can also be used to configure a default route. The command to put a static route in the routing table is ip route prefix mask {ip-address | interface-type interface-number } [distance]. the next hop IP address or the exit interface. If you choose the next hop address, use the IP address of the neighboring router that the local router is connected to. This IP address and neighbor must be in the direction of the destination network. Instead of using a next hop IP, you can use the exit interface of the local router. CAUTION: NEVER GIVE EXIT INTERFACE FOR A LINK IMPLEMENTED ON ROUTER WITH A BROADCAST INTERFACE. The exit interface can be used just for simplicity, but only do it with non-broadcast interfaces such as serial interfaces. If you configure this on a broadcast interface such Ethernet, the route will only be added when the interface is up. The bad thing is that the router will think that any destination host it doesnt know about through some other router to be directly connected to that Ethernet interface. This can cause a huge amount of ARP traffic, a huge ARP cache, and even make the router crash and reload! Default Routing Information through Static Routing: The two most common are to give a stub router a route to send all of its data to or to give an edge router the route it needs to send all of its data to a service provider . Adding Internet Access to Routers(Intranet): it is not required that BrusRtr1 know all of the networks that are in the ISP network; it would have to know about all of the networks on the Internet. That could be hundreds of thousands of routes, too many routes for the routers

to handle. So, you are going to route all of the unknown data toward the ISP router or network through a static route entry. BrusRtr1(config)#ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 100.100.100.2 Advertising Redundant Link: The secondary link will be configured with a static route so that it will only be used if the primary link goes down. This type of static route is called a floating static route. It is called this because you modify the administrative distance of the static route so that it floats right above the route for whatever dynamic routing protocol you might be using .