Incoming and Outgoing router traffic

[adityanaidu]

Hi everybody,

What exactly is the concept of incoming and outgoing traffic at one particular router interface? Can outgoing traffic be considered as the traffic forwarded from that interface to another interface?

Cheers

Aditya Naidu

[pkhatri]

Hi Aditya,

There can be two source of traffic that form the outgoing traffic on an interface:

- traffic received from other interfaces on that router, which is then forwarded to the interface under consideration

- traffic generated by the router itself. Typically, this will only be a small percentage of the total outgoing traffic and may include things such as routing updates, management (SNMP) traffic etc.

Hope that helps - pls rate the post if it does.

Paresh

[jackko]

imagine an interface has two doors.

|| interface ||

thus packet flowing towards the interface would be considered "in",

--> || interface || <--

alternatively, packet flowing the opposite direction would be considered "out",

<-- || interface || -->

now, let have a look at the router with 2 interfaces.

|| interface 1 || -- routing process -- || interface 2 ||

packet originated from subnet connected to interface 1 destined for the subnet connected to interface 2:

--> || interface 1 || --> --> || interface 2 || -->

in other words,

the packet firstly flows "in" interface 1, "out" interface 1, "in" interface 2, and finally "out" interface 2.