Advantages of Routers | disadvantages of Routers

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of routers and its basics. It mentions benefits or advantages of routers and drawbacks or disadvantages of routers.

What is Router?

Introduction:
This networking device provides interconnection between two dissimilar networks. It operates at layer-3 of OSI stack and takes care of routing of packets based on routing table. It uses IP addressing for routing the packets. The IP address of each hosts contain two parts viz. network address and host address. The router checks destination host address, source host address and network address in order to route IP packet appropriately. Refer TCP-IP Packet format to know about various fields and their purpose in the networking system.

The figure-1 depicts router used to connect ATM and LAN networks. Router provides connectivity for mixed MAC environments by working with higher layer protocols. Hence connection between different network segments viz. ATM and LAN is possible.

Most routers are multiprotocol routers and are capable of handling multiple network layer protocols. To make this possible, router must be equipped with appropriate software for each protocol to be supported. Unlike bridges, routers can intelligently determine most efficient path from source to any destination. To make this possible, various algorithms such as RIP, OSPF, BGP are used as routing protocols.

Benefits or advantages of Routers

Following are the benefits or advantages of Routers:
➨It provides connection between different network architectures such as ethernet & token ring etc.
➨It can choose best path across the internetwork using dynamic routing algorithms.
➨It can reduce network traffic by creating collision domains and also by creating broadcast domains.
➨It provides sophisticated routing, flow control and traffic isolation.
➨They are configurable which allows network manager to make policy based on routing decisions.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of Routers

Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of Routers:
➨They operate based on routable network protocols.
➨They are expensive compare to other network devices.
➨Dynamic router communications can cause additional network overhead. This results into less bandwidth for user data.
➨They are slower as they need to analyze data from layer-1 through layer-3.
➨They require considerable amount of initial configurations.
➨They are protocol dependent devices which must understand the protocol they are forwarding.

Conclusion: In order to understand advantages of Routers and disadvantages of Routers one has to understand Routers basics and difference between Firewall vs Router , Bridge vs Router , Switch vs Router and Virtual Router vs Physical Router.

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