Topic summary
Link-state protocol
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Link-state routing protocol.
The link-state protocol is performed by every switching node in the network (i.e., nodes which are prepared to forward packets; in the Internet, these are called routers). The basic concept of link-state routing is that every node constructs a map of the connectivity to the network in the form of a graph, showing which nodes are connected to which other nodes. Each node then independently calculates the next best logical path from it to every possible destination in the network. Each collection of best paths will then form each node's routing table.