Routing

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This article is about routing in computer networks. For other uses, see Routing (disambiguation).Routing (or routeing) is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send data or physical traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network, the Internet, and transport networks.
Routing directs forwarding, the passing of logically addressed packets from their source toward their ultimate destination through intermediary nodes; typically hardware devices called routers, bridges, gateways, firewalls, or switches. Ordinary computers with multiple network cards can also forward packets and perform routing, though they are not specialized hardware and may suffer from limited performance. The routing process usually directs forwarding on the basis of routing tables which maintain a record of the routes to various network destinations. Thus constructing routing tables, which are held in the routers' memory, becomes very important for efficient routing.
Routing, in a more narrow sense of the term, is often contrasted with bridging in its assumption that network addresses are structured and that similar addresses imply proximity within the network. Because structured addresses allow a single routing table entry to represent the route to a group of devices, structured addressing (routing, in the narrow sense) outperforms unstructured addressing (bridging) in large networks, and has become the dominant form of addressing on the Internet, though bridging is still widely used, albeit within localized environments.

Routing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routing