In the context of Data Communication Networks, a static route is a manual route that is created by the network administrator. A static route is a way of manually configuring path selection for routers. Unlike a dynamic route, there are no routing protocols used for creating a static route. Routing protocols are used to create a dynamic route which is exactly opposite to the static route. While creating a static route; routes are manually added to the routing table. Static routes are required where there is lack of communication, about the topology in use, between the routers of the network. Network administrator plays a key role when the routers are configured statically.

How Static Route Works

In data networks using static routes, the fixed paths for the routers are entered within them by the network administrator manually or statically. It is also possible to configure the whole data network using static routes instead of dynamic routes. The major disadvantage of this approach of routing configuration is that this type of router configuration is not tolerant against faults. For instance, if the network failure occurs between two nodes or routers that are configured statically, then the traffic will not be automatically routed as in case of dynamic routing. In dynamic routing, the routers uses routing table to find alternate path so that the network doesn’t come to halt. In this case, the traffic has to wait until the fault is repaired or the network administrator re-configure the router to take alternate path. There is a possibility where the static routes become little intelligent and make routing sense; like default routes or stub networks.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Static Route:

Static routes have both advantages and disadvantages as well; some of the major advantages and disadvantages, in comparison with dynamic routes, are given below:

Advantages:

• One of the major advantage of using Static Routes is that they are really easy to configure as compared to dynamic routes.
• Another advantages of using static route is that there is no overhead for routing protocols which is required for dynamic routes.

Disadvantages:

• Network using static routes in not fault tolerant.
• One of the most obvious disadvantage of using Static Route is that it doesn’t use any routing protocol; hence all configuration has to be done manually.
• Another disadvantage of using static route is that there is no way of routing around any network outages that may exist.

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