9.3. Routing Protocol Basics

9.3.1. Routing and Forwarding

In the context of the Internet, the term “routing” is used loosely to identify both control and data plane functions. It is, however, important to differentiate between these functions. The role of the control plane is to allow nodes to discover the topology of the network and compute routes to other nodes. This is accomplished by running a routing protocol that advertises topology and reachability information throughout the network. The reachability information disseminated by the routing protocol is consolidated in a forwarding table at each node, which contains the identity of the next node and the outgoing interface to forward packets addressed to each destination.

The data plane ...

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