Session 12: More routing and switching

In previous sessions you looked at how devices are connected together, and what some of the devices used in commercial networks actually look like. In this session you will revisit routers and switches in more detail to see how they operate. Routers and switches are the most common interconnecting devices found on local area networks (LANs). They are used to link end devices together and to link networks together.

You will look at what these devices do – in other words, how they actually deal with the data they are moving from source device to end device.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• understand how ARP works to link Network Access layer addresses with Internet layer addresses
• understand how routers make their routing decisions
• understand how switches make their switching decisions.