Web Caching and Replication

2.3. Routing

So far we have discussed how IP solves the global addressing problem and how individual IP datagrams are composed. Now we discuss how the Internet routes datagrams from their source host to their final destination. This process determines the path packets take through the network, and, as we show in Chapter 8, this has a large impact on Web proxy deployment.

The Internet is a packet-based store-and-forward network, which means that the source host sends a datagram not directly to its final destination but to a router on the same physical network. The router forwards the datagram to another router with which it shares another physical network, and so on until the datagram reaches the final destination. This process is called routing. ...