v  Some manufacturers have combined bridges and routers together calling them brouters. These are effectively routers with secondary bridging capabilities built in.

v  A brouter will look for logical station address information in packets that it receives. If that information is unavailable in the packet, the brouters will then simply act as a bridge allowing the packet to pass if its physical station address for the destination qualifies. Often brouters are used to connect different types of LANs together, like token ring and ethernet, while still providing routing services for protocols like TCP/IP. Another deviant from the marriage of router and bridge is a routing bridge used to give a some of the best path selection ability of a router to a bridge instead. These devices are limited as they are not fully functioning routers, only souped up bridges.

v  Brouters combines the best of both bridges and routers.

v  When brouters receive packets that are routable, they will operate as a router by choosing the best path for the packet and forwarding it to its destination. However, when a non-routable packet is received, the brouter functions as a bridge, forwarding the packet based on hardware address.

v  To do this brouters maintain both bridging table, which contains hardware address, and a routing table, which contains network address.

v  There is a device called a brouter which will function similar to a bridge for network transport protocols that are not routable, and will function as a router for routable protocols. It functions at the network and data link layers of the OSI network model.