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All 5 Flashcards — Static and dynamic routing
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Question
What is a routing table?
Answer
A list held by a router saying, for each destination network, which neighbouring router to forward to. No router knows the whole path — it only ever chooses the next hop.
Question
What is static routing, and what are its advantages?
Answer
Routes typed in by an administrator, never changing unless edited. It uses no bandwidth or CPU, behaves completely predictably, has no protocol to go wrong, and cannot be misled by a false routing message.
Question
What is the main disadvantage of static routing?
Answer
It does not notice a broken link, so traffic keeps being sent into the fault until someone edits the table by hand. Every change is also manual, so the work grows with the size of the network.
Question
What is dynamic routing, and what does it cost?
Answer
Routers exchange information about what they can reach and build their own tables, adapting automatically when a link fails. It costs bandwidth for the messages, CPU and memory for the tables, and is harder to configure and diagnose.
Question
What is convergence?
Answer
The time between something changing on the network and every router agreeing on the new routes. During convergence traffic may loop or be dropped, which is the main weakness of dynamic routing.
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Full study notes for Static and dynamic routing
Topic 2.3 hub
Data transmissions
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