Sunday, October 13, 2013

Routing Control-Data plane interaction



What are the functions of a control plane and data plane of a router?/How the router creates the routing table?
The Router consists of a control plane and data plane, the control plane is used to exchange the routing updates of routing protocols like RIP,OSPF,IS-IS,BGP. Each protocol when enabled on a router initiates it process to build its tables in RIB, am not going in detail about each routing protocol how they work, as our main focus is working of control and data planes. Once the routing databases exchanged over the control plane the router puts the best routes of the router databases into routing table and a copy of it is sent to the Forwarding Information Base(FIB) in the data plane, the below figure illustrates the control plane and date plane functions of the router.




Once the FIB is created by the router, the data is routed with the help of forwarding information base(FIB). Whenever there is a topology change the routers updates their RIB which updates the Route table in control plane and again a copy of Route table is sent to FIB.

How a packet is routed?
When the data packet is received by the router it checks the IP header of the packet to find the destination IP, then checks its routing table for the longest prefix match, if a match is found the router sends that packet over the outgoing interface of the entry present in the routing table.






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