What Is Switch Router?

If you've ever been on a long car trip, you might know that there are two types of drivers: those who love to drive and those who do not. The same is valid for networking devices. Switches and routers are designed to move data around networks but they differ. A button only looks at the location of each machine, while a router looks at each device's Internet Protocol (IP) address. A switch router combines the abilities of both switches and routers for routing data around and between networks. This device can also move data based on a device's physical address as a switch and forward packets based on the location of the following hop address as a router. Switches operate at the Data Link or the second layer, while routers operate at the Network layer or the third layer of the OSI Reference Model. However, switch routers perform mainly in the second layer and many of the layer three functions that routers do. Most routers perform packet switching using software running on a microprocessor. Switch routers implement routing using application-specific integrated circuits. That is one of the types of IC made for single dedicated processing; it is only meant to do one thing: data packet routing. Unfortunately, that makes them less flexible than dedicated routers. What if we could merge these two technologies? What if we created a device that was a half switch and half router? That would be cool. Well, now you can! A switch router is a type of router that uses labels to perform routing. It is in the middle of a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network and is in charge of title switching to route packets being carried by the network. In other words, it's like a regular router with extra stuff attached!