When forwarding a packet which route will the packet select?

First, routing is the process a router performs when making forwarding decisions for each packet arriving at the gateway interface. To forward a packet to a destination network, the router requires a route to that network. If a route to a destination network does not exist on the router, the packet will be forwarded to the default gateway. Now, the destination network can be a number of routers or hops away from the default gateway. If the router has an entry for the network in its routing table, it would only indicate the next-hop router to which the packet is to be forwarded to and not the exact route to the final router. To sum it up, the routing process uses a routing table to map the destination address to the next hop and then forwards the packet to the next-hop address.