Policy-based routing does not rely exclusively upon the destination IP address to define the destination route (i.e. the remote device to be used for transferring the data). Further information can be used—such as the service or the protocol used, sender addresses, or the destination for the data packets—to select the destination route. Policy-based routing can be used to achieve a significantly finer-grained routing behavior, such as in the following application scenarios:
- The LAN’s entire Internet traffic is diverted to a proxy without entering the proxy address into the browsers. As the users do not notice the proxy routing, the scenario is named "transparent" proxy.