I saw a map of undersea internet cables the other day and it’s crazy how many branches there are. It got me wondering - if I’m (based in the UK) playing an online game from someone in Japan for example, how is the route worked out? Does my ISP know that to get to place X, the data has to be routed via cable 1, cable 2 etc. but to get to place Z it needs to go via cable 3, 4?
That sounds like quite a messy and inefficient process! But I guess as long as it can be done quickly enough, it doesn’t really matter?
I think the previous comment omitted something, which is why you think it’s inefficient: routers don’t ask for directions every packet, they record the directions in their route table.
At the back-bone scale of the internet, routers actually announce the addresses they are responsible for.
Paths are judged by how specific these announcements are. A router announcing a single IP is the preffered destination, compared to a router that announces a block that contains it. So routers will forward it to whichever router more accurately describes the destination IP.
This makes up part of the calculated Path Cost of various routes to reach a destination.
If router A tries to contact router D and knows that router B and C can both forward that packet, router A will send it to the router that announced the lowest path cost to D.
Its a lot more complicated than that, but that is how datacenters can disappear from the internet (by wrongly announcing they no longer have a path to the IPs inside the datacenter), or how a small ISP can accidentally route the entire internet through their network (by accidentally announcing extremely low path costs). Both of these have happened.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-verizon-and-a-bgp-optimizer-knocked-large-parts-of-the-internet-offline-today/
So, the internet is both fragile and resilient.
It can route around damage, but cannot deal with mistakes/maliciousness above a certain “ring” of control.
I’m no expert but it seems like the most efficient way with the given technology! The hops between routers are much less frantic than (I think) you’re imagining.
To oversimplify, think of it like boxes in boxes where each box is a router.
Your PC is in the first small box. It says “I want to connect to [IP]” and the box says “I don’t have that IP, let me ask the bigger box”
The bigger box (your ISP) says “I don’t have it either, I’ll ask the big box”
The big box says “I don’t have it but based on the address, I know it’s in this other big box”
Other big box says the same thing and sends it to another small box. That small box has the PC you’re looking for and the packet is delivered!
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computers-and-internet/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:the-internet/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:routing-with-redundancy/a/internet-routing
I wouldn’t call that “messy and inefficient” but you do you. I’d be curious to know what’s a “clean and efficient” solution for you when it comes to routing packets around the planet :)
Ah yeah this and @MelastSB@sh.itjust.works 's comment clarify the routing table thing. Before I was assuming they just blindly forwarded stuff until one router knows where to go, but if they have a rough idea from the IP address prefix that makes more sense.
They dont have a rough idea, they have a very accurate picture of where they should send a packet based on the IP address.
Routers at the internet-backbone scale actually announce the IP addresses they are responsible for, as well as other routes (with an additional path cost added) that they can reach.
So, they match a destination IP to the most accurate IP block in their routing table (so a destination of 8.8.8.8 with 2 entries of 8.8.8.0/24 and 8.8.0.0/16, it will match the 8.8.8.0/24 route) and forward the packet to the router that announced it.
Routing at the internet scale is much smarter than routing at the home (even business) level