Network Routing Fundamentals, Applications, and Emerging Technologies

Book Preface

Overview

Coverage of routing techniques in various wired and wireless networks is the unique proposition of this book. Routing protocols and algorithms are the brains of any network. The selection of topics in this book is clear: we attempt to explain routing in its entirety, starting from fundamental concepts, then moving through routing on the Internet, and finally cutting across the recent‐day cellular, ad hoc, and wireless networks. At the same time, the book has significant coverage of related topics, i.e. network reliability, management, and security. The core concepts elaborated in the book provide a foundation for understanding the next‐generation networks and pushing them to their safe boundary limits. These concepts are integrated with illustrations and flow diagrams that will enable the readers to experience a fly‐through of the routing processes over the devices.

In this age of rapidly evolving networks, this book stands at the intersection of historical network routing techniques and evolving concepts that the world is working on. The book builds on the foundation to create a ‘network analyst’ and a ‘routing strategist’.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized into five parts, starting from a basic introduction and ending with advanced concepts.

The first part of the book presents the fundamental concepts of networks and routing. Chapter 1 provides basic knowledge about networks, addressing schemes, architectures, and standards so as to act as a foundation for those readers who have not done a basic course in computer networks. Routing algorithms based on various strategies are described in Chapter 2. All the major categories of fundamental routing protocols are covered in Chapter 3.

The second part of the book presents routing with quality of service and traffic engineering. Chapter 4 has complete coverage of QoS measures, terminologies, algorithms, and protocols. Chapter 5 is dedicated to traffic engineering and describes multiprotocol label switching and TE routing algorithms.

The third part of the book presents routing on the Internet. This part starts with exhaustive coverage of two major kinds of interior gateway protocol in Chapter 6, and ends with the detailed evolution history of exterior gateway protocol along with its operational details in Chapter 7.

The fourth part of the book presents all other routing contexts, from legacy networks to future‐generation networks. The heritage ATM network is covered in Chapter 8, including frame format, architecture, service categories, and routing. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 present the characteristics, followed by comprehensive coverage of most of the routing techniques in contemporary networks, i.e. cellular wireless networks, wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks. Chapter 12 is dedicated to the fundamentals, applications, and routing in upcoming networks for the future generation, i.e. 6LoWPAN.

The fifth part of the book presents advanced concepts related to network routing. Chapter 13 is dedicated to one of the major concerns in the area of network routing, i.e. security. The chapter contains sections on various kinds of attack, metrics to calculate exposure to attacks, security in battlefield networks, mobile agents for network management, and the upcoming area of cognitive security. Chapter 14 presents the fundamentals of network reliability, fault tolerance, and delay‐tolerant networks.