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First, routing is the process a router performs when making forwarding decisions for each packet arriving at the gateway interface. To forward a packet to a destination network, the router requires a route to that network. If a route to a destination network does not exist on the router, the packet will be forwarded to the default gateway. Now, the destination network can be a number of routers or hops away from the default gateway. If the router has an entry for the network in its routing table, it would only indicate the next-hop router to which the packet is to be forwarded to and not the exact route to the final router. To sum it up, the routing process uses a routing table to map the destination address to the next hop and then forwards the packet to the next-hop address.
First, routing is the process a router performs when making forwarding decisions for each packet arriving at the gateway interface. To forward a packet to a destination network, the router requires a route to that network. If a route to a destination network does not exist on the router, the packet will be forwarded to the default gateway. Now, the destination network can be a number of routers or hops away from the default gateway. If the router has an entry for the network in its routing table, it would only indicate the next-hop router to which the packet is to be forwarded to and not the exact route to the final router. To sum it up, the routing process uses a routing table to map the destination address to the next hop and then forwards the packet to the next-hop address.
the network portion of the destination ip address
It determines which local IP on a given Router Table, be it DHCP or static, that packet is assigned to.
Packet forwarding in simple terms is the forwarding of packets from one node to another from networking point of view. For example, a router or a switch. These networking devices make routing devices with the help of their routing tables and then select an outgoing interface. After that they make some changes in the packet header and push (forward) the packet to the selected interface. In case you don't know the meaning of packet. Packer is the smallest unit of size in networking. Different networks has different packet size. For example, in ATM Networks the packet size is of 53 Bytes.
Switches and Bridges
The Destination Address (Layer 2 or Layer 3)
Routing table
A switch uses MAC address to forward frames while a router uses IP addresses.
Router uses IP address of destination node to do the direct packet switching..while bridge & switch uses the MAC address to packet forwarding.
Answering "If a router recieves a packet that is does not know how to foward what type of route must be configured on the router to prevent the router from dropping it?"
The router discards the packet. The router forwards the packet via the default route