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Routing
Routers are dedicated nodes that decide how the packets will be delivered to their destination
- Shortest path
- Fastest path
- Route around network failures
Routing tables: where should I forward a packet with an Australian destination address?
Routers have limited knowledge of their environment (impossible to have complete knowledge of the entire Internet's state)
Notes:
The most important (non-security-related) problem of the current Internet infrastructure is the ever-growing size of routing tables.
Such things happen when a proof-of-concept technology finds itself twenty years later on steroids, supporting orders of magnitude more users/data/services than originally envisioned.