What is Shortest Path Routing?
It refers to the algorithms that help to find the shortest path between a sender and receiver for routing the data packets through the network in terms of shortest distance, minimum cost, and minimum time.
- It is mainly for building a graph or subnet containing routers as nodes and edges as communication lines connecting the nodes.
- Hop count is one of the parameters that is used to measure the distance.
- Hop count: It is the number that indicates how many routers are covered. If the hop count is 6, there are 6 routers/nodes and the edges connecting them.
- Another metric is a geographic distance like kilometers.
- We can find the label on the arc as the function of bandwidth, average traffic, distance, communication cost, measured delay, mean queue length, etc.
Shortest Path Algorithm in Computer Network
In between sending and receiving data packets from the sender to the receiver, it will go through many routers and subnets. So as a part of increasing the efficiency in routing the data packets and decreasing the traffic, we must find the shortest path. In this article, we are discussing the shortest path algorithms.