Destination and Next Hop Addresses

What is the relationship between the destination address in a datagram header and the address of the next hop to which the datagram is forwarded?The Destination IP address field in a datagram contains the address of the Ultimate destination.When a router receives a datagram,the router extracts the destination address D,and uses it to compute the address of the next router to which datagram should be sent,N.Although the datagram is sent directly to address N,the header in the datagram retains destination address D.All routes are computed using IP address.After computing the address of a next hop,N,IP software uses the address binding to translate N to an equivalent hardware address for transmission.