ROUTING

The internet is constantly changing and growing.New networks are continually added and links between networks are added and removed,fail and come back.It is the job of routing to determine the best path to the destination and to create a routing table listing the best path for all the different destination.

Working on routers was the most interesting experience and this made me understand on they importance in wireless networks.There are two types of routing and these are;

Static routing :this is term used when the routing table is created by manual configuration.This is sometimes convenient for small networks but can easily become very difficult and error prone for large networks.Worse ,if the best path becomes unusable because of equipment failure or other reasons,static will not make use of the best path.
Dynamic routing;is a method in which network elements, in particular routers, exchange information about their state and the state of their neighbours in the network,and then this information to automatically pick the best path and create the routing table.If something changes,such as a router failing or a new router being put into service,then the dynamic routing protocols make adjustment to the routing table.The system of package exchanges is known as routing protocol.There are many routing protocols that are used in the Internet including OSPF,BGP ,RIP,and EIGRP. During the configuration of the routers we found that dynamic routing was better than static routing.

Wireless networks are like wired networks in that they need dynamic routing protocols,but they are also different enough from wired networks that they need different routing protocols.Things are not clear when working with wireless networks.Wireless communication can be affected by objects moving into the path of the signal ,or by interfering signals.Hence this is one of the disadvantages of wireless connection and when setting up the routers the area must be clear.

Basically we worked on two types of routers and each router had to configured differently depending on the type of software.

INTERNET PROTOCOLS

Standards,standards everywhere?There's an old joke that a giraffe is actually a horse designed by committee and that animal we call networking has had its share of committees and standards over the years.Actually, the standards committees have done a great job.The standards and protocols that define the main networking protocols function pretty well, in part due to the modular nature of the key networking protocols. A protocol is simply a language computers use to speak to eachother.
Each protocol handles a specific set of tasks and as network standards have matured, the standards committees have been able to add improvements without rewriting the entire ''network stack''.
Most of computer users just know how to browse through the Internet,sent mails etc without realising what really goes on for them to receive those mails or send them.Take a key press as an example.First the keyboard controller chip in your PC senses that you have pressed a Key and works out which one.Next,the keyboard controller turns this information into a scan code ,a piece of data that represents the key you pressed and stores it in a small block of memory called a buffer .The Pc's operating system then checks the keyboard buffer for data,sees that something is in there and reads it.Finally,tha data is passed back to the application currently wailting for input,whre the keyboard data is analyzed and acted upon-maybe adding a character to a document or completing a password entry sequence.All the way through this process,things must happen just so,or the process won't work properly;in other words,there are protocols involved.To handle input from the keyboard,for instance,severial protocols and standards are in place to eliminate potential problem.This process is just for the keyboard now imagine more complicated processes,this is where now we see the importance of these protocols.
The three most popular protocol families mostly encountered in the real world are NetBEUI,IPX/SPX, and TCP/IP.