Routers - An Introduction

Today Internet is the single largest hub for people searching for data related to communication, entertainment, education etc. every second all around the whole world. A huge amount of data is transferred between computers all over the world each second. We can find a large amount of information on almost all topics we need on net instantly within few moments. People sitting at a far distance from each other can communicate with each other in just few flashes of eyes lids.

But how do we get information, which is stored on some other machine on our screen in almost no time?

We send message or an email to our friends, how does the data find its path to the person who is sitting thousand of kilometers away from you?

Routers are the backbone of the net, which handle the flow of such a huge data. Router is a specialized computer that takes care of data routing on the Internet along thousands of pathways, because of which all your messages and information are sent to those who are intended to receive them.

Let’s take it this way, suppose you want to send an email to your friend who is hundreds of kilometers away from you, after some time, the message travels through the network and passes through thousands of computers which are connected to Internet and reaches to the computer of your friend. But how does your message reach your friend’s computer? How does it know the exact address of your friend’s machine? How does the message reach your friend even if there is congestion in between the networks? Router is a machine that handles the responsibility of carrying out all the above tasks. Routers help in managing data flow on the Internet between different networks.

Let’s go through simple working of Internet, every computer on net is assigned with a physical address, which is unique, just like the addresses of our houses where all the emails and other data are routed. This physical address is attached to the data that is sent in the form of packets. Each packet carries the destination machine address with it, when the intended machine checks that the packet contains it’s address, it accepts the data. Similarly, every computer on the pathway checks all the packets to find if the data is intended for that machine. This may cause a performance problem in the form of congestion in the network. This problem is taken care of by routers, routers read all the packets and send them by a pathway through different networks to the machine which is intended to receive the data, this helps in reducing the congestion.

Routers play an important role in deciding where a particular information should go, there is a huge data flow on the Internet which can cause clogging of the network, routers takes care of this situation by deciding which information is to be sent through which network and which information is not needed to send through it. Routers take care that the data reaches to the intended machine. In order to achieve this goal, routers use different routing algorithms, which help in forwarding the data through the network to the destination machine. Routers are also useful for translation of various protocols if two networks meet each other and protocols of one network are not compatible with that of the other’s.

Router uses different tools in doing it’s work. One of the tools that help router in deciding where the packet should go is "Configuration Table". A configuration table is a collection of information, which includes information on which connections lead to particular group of addresses, priorities for those connections to be used, information about the rules for handling the data routing.

There are different types of routers, right from small router which handles routing of data to very few computers, to the routers which have a huge capacity of processing millions of data packets and routing them to different networks per second.