The Routing Area is responsible for facilitating the operation of the Internet routing system by maintaining and improving the scalability and stability characteristics of the existing routing protocols and developing new protocols, extensions, and bug fixes. Forwarding methods (such as destination-based unicast and multicast forwarding, MPLS, and pseudowire) as well as associated routing and signaling protocols (such as OSPF, IS-IS, BGP, RSVP-TE, LDP, PIM, RPL, and VPNs at Layer 2 and Layer 3), and both centralized and distributed routing architectures (to address, for example, virtualization, service chaining, traffic engineering, and data center routing) are within the scope of the Routing Area. The interactions of routing systems with configuration and orchestration platforms (for example, routing-related YANG models and path computation engines) are handled in the Routing Area as well.

The Routing Area also works on Generalized MPLS used in the control plane of optical networks, and the security and manageability aspects of the routing system. The Routing Area Working Groups cover a wide range of data plane technologies (Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3) and control protocols.

The Routing Area intersects most frequently with the Internet Area, the Operations and Management Area, and the Security Area. Interaction with the Internet Area concentrates mainly on IP forwarding and encapsulation. Ongoing work with the Operations and Management Area is on developing YANG models and considering the management and operation of the routing infrastructure. With the Security Area, the ongoing focus is on routing protocol security and its impact on the Internet's infrastructure security.

Work in the Routing Area often overlaps with work in other standards development organizations (SDOs). In particular, there have been interactions with Broadband Forum, IEEE, and ITU-T.