When forwarding a packet which route will the packet select?
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.