Router Functions | Home Network

If you have setup your home network yourself, you will have went to your local computer store and bought a home router so that you can share the Internet access in your house. So what's the function of a router ?

A router is a network component that basically routes traffic from one network to another network. Imagine this, your home network is your own private network and the external Internet is another huge connected network of computers. So a router takes the traffic from one of your computer in your network and pass it to which ever servers that you want to access out there on the Internet. A router is sort of like a bridge to allow you to talk to other networks.

How does it know which traffic goes to what computer ? A router is a very smart device. When you access a webpage like Google, it notes down what is your IP address of the computer that is making the request. This could be a private IP we have spoke of in the last post. It then knows that you are making a request to view Google so it connects you to Google, taking note of which IP has made the request. When Google servers responds, it checks its internal list and remembers which IP address made the request and transmits the information back to the computer that made the request in the first place.

A router can handle multiple network connections this way by taking note of which computers want to access which servers and routing information to and fro between them. This is way you can share the Internet access in your house because your router is working hard examining the traffic between all your computers and the servers on the Internet.