# What are flood routing and random routing?

Computer NetworkInternetMCA

Let us begin by understanding what flood routing is.

## Flood Routing

Flood Routing is the study of flood routing that predicts the potential flood of an area. It is used to determine the time and magnitude of flow.

Flood routing is done by using the velocity of water, flow rate and local geology of an area.

As all routes are examined, there will be at least one route that is the shortest one. All nodes that are combined directly or indirectly are visited.

## Limitations of flooding

The limitations of flooding are as follows −

• Flooding generates a huge number of duplicate packets.

• A suitable damping mechanism must always be used.

The advantages of flooding are as follows −

• These are Highly Robust, emergency messages can be transferred (Ex: military applications)

• Construct route in the virtual circuit

• Flooding always determines the shortest path.

• It can broadcast messages to every node.

## Random Routing

Like Flooding, Random routing is also a simple and robust technique or routing and also has some improvements over flooding −

It results in a controlled traffic load.

The outgoing link is picked in a random fashion after eliminating the incoming link.

If the likely possibilities of choosing any link are the same, it amounts to picking the outgoing link in a round-robin style.

This is to designate probabilities to every outgoing link and to choose a link based on those probabilities. The probabilities can be determined based on the data rate. In that case, we have −

$$\mathrm{P_{i}=R_{i}/ \displaystyle\sum\limits_{j}R_{i}}$$

Where,