There are certain common technologies used in both switching and routing that define a set of "check-points" seen on device datasheets.

Management technologies used are SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and CLI (Command Line Interface)

• Most common IEEE (Layer 2 Ethernet) protocols are 802.1D, STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), 802.1Q, VLANs (Virtual LANs), 802.3ad, Trunking or Link Aggregation, and other less common protocols such as 802.1s (STP per VLAN), 802.1w (Fast convergence STP), 802.1x (port based security), 802.1v (Protocol and MAC VLANs) and many others.
• The most common routing protocols are RIP (Routing Information Protocol) and OSPFv2 (Open Shortest Path First). BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol) is less common.
• Common multicast protocols are IGMP and PIM-SM
• The most common QoS architecture is DiffServ.