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What Are The Main Features Of A Router

What Are The Main Features Of A Router

It can be said that routers are one of the most important pieces of the internet structure. They establish switching functions of the internet and intranets. Practically any network can have a router: corporate LANs and WANs, backbone service providers (carriers), ISP’s, or even home LANs.

The biggest router manufacturer is Cisco, and most router configuration certifications, like CCNA, are a standard for engineers and technicians.

A router’s basic function is to connect two networks, providing the switching facilities in order to transfer data from one point in a network to a point on another network. For example, from a private corporate network to the ISP’s network. Routers are also intelligent enough to connect two different types of network, like Frame Relay to ATM.

If we reference the OSI model, routers work at the bottom 3 Layers, which correspond to the physical, link, and network layers, in order to provide addressing and switching. In some cases, routers also work at layer 4, which is the Transparent Layer, in order to provide more reliable data transfer and ensure end-to-end delivery.

At an operative level, routers can be configured to establish many types of routing features. Whereas switches only operate at layer 2 of the OSI model, routers have many more capabilities. A router can determine the destination address, the priority level of each packet transmitted, determination of the least-cost route, minimum delay route, and many more. This way, for example, on ATM data transmission, routers can determine which packets to prioritize, like packets of video data. This ensures that streaming video will be transmitted with no delay. Audio data packets will have the second level of priority, and text packets the lowest level.

Routers also communicate with each other within a network, sending “keep-alive” signals continuously in order to establish if each router on the network is still functioning. This way, service providers can immediately determine when a router is down and where the failure occurred. This communication among routers within a network is also a means of self-learning, wherein each router has information about the whole network and will immediately adapt to any changes within that network, like the addition of a new router.

For communication between routers, a port and protocols are used to transmit and receive specific types of data. Routers can determine subnets within a network and confine data traffic to it. In this sense, each subnet is defined by a router port at either a physical (port) or logical (IP) level and is known as a broadcast domain. All devices connected to the subnet will be able to share data and devices outside of that domain will not see any of the traffic.

However, depending on the ports used, some may be vulnerable to external attacks, which is why firewalls and proxy are mostly used in conjunction with routers.

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