The effective choice of an appropriate route is a key to successful routing. Design and choice of appropriate routing strategy are extremely important for achieving the desired performance from the internetworks.
In general, there exist two primary classes of routing strategies: centralized routing and distributed routing. Naturally, each category has a set of routing architectures belonging to it (Banerjee 2004).
In the centralized routing, routes are computed centrally by a designated central router and then distribute these routes to all routers in a given subnet. The centralized approach is suitable for small networks. This approach has concerns about control-traffic volume, single point of failure, and delayed adaptation to changes in topology.
In distributed routing, routing choices are made locally, in a collaborative / pre-planned manner. Due to distributed nature, processing too is distributed and unlike the central model, it does not tax a single router's processor(s) (Banerjee 2004).
In this lesson, we will discuss in more details different routing protocols. This lesson consists of nine sections:
- About Routing Terminology
- Classification of Routing Architectures
- Shortest Path Routing
- Flooding Based Routing
- Flow-based Routing
- Distance Vector Routing Algorithm
- Link-State Routing Algorithm
- Hierarchical Routing Architectures
- Issues in Hierarchical Routing Architectures
- The border gateway protocol (bgp)