The questions are re-arranged by priority. The ones coming first are related to validating my understanding and the ones coming later are questions coming from pure curiosity.
- Forwarding is said to be done on the 'data plane' and routing is said to be done on the 'control plane'. I've heard the terms 'data' and 'control' in other subjects such as computer architecture, but I am not grasping the usages of them here. Could you explain it in a bit more detail?
- In the textbook, there are three mechanisms for the switching fabric. One of them is "switching via memory" and I couldn't understand what this meant:
Some modern routers switch via memory. A major difference from early routers, however, is that the lookup of the destination address and the storing of the packet into the appropriate memory location are performed by processing on the input line cards.