6.9 Conclusion

Addressing and routing provide the basic functionality for forwarding user and network management traffic through the network. In developing the addressing/routing architecture, you must understand the fundamental concepts behind addressing and routing and how they are used to provide hierarchy and interconnectivity in the network.

This chapter provides some new ways of looking at routing, routing flows, and routing protocols. We used WGs and FAs to develop hard and soft boundaries for routing flows and then applied a number of techniques to manipulate these flows. These mechanisms, combined with evaluating and choosing routing protocols for the network, as well as where to apply the various addressing strategies, provide a picture of addressing and routing for the network that will enable you to optimize the forwarding of traffic flows through your network.