Packet forwarding

Imagine you're sending a letter from your house to your friend's house. You put the letter into an envelope with your friend's address written on it, and then you give the envelope to the postman.

Similarly, when you're sending data over the internet, it gets broken up into small packets and each packet is like an envelope. The packet has the destination IP address written on it, so it knows where it needs to go.

Once the packet reaches a router, the router looks at the destination IP address and decides which direction to send the packet. It might send the packet directly to the destination if it's connected to the same network, or it might send it to another router if it needs to go to a different network.

This process is called packet forwarding. It's like a game of hot potato where each router is the potato and it passes the packet along until it reaches its destination. Each router decides which direction to pass the packet based on the destination IP address.

Finally, when all the packets reach their destination, they get reassembled into the original message or data that was sent. It's like your friend receiving all the envelopes with different parts of a letter inside and putting the pieces together to read the letter.