Equal-cost multi-path routing (ECMP) is arouting strategy wherepacket forwarding to a single destination can occur over multiple best paths with equal routing priority. Multi-path routing can be used in conjunction with most routing protocols because it is a per-hop local decision made independently at each router. It can substantially increase bandwidth byload-balancing traffic over multiple paths; however, there may be significant problems in deploying it in practice.^[1]

Load balancing by per-packetmultipath routing was generally disfavored due to the impact of rapidly changing latency,packet reordering andmaximum transmission unit (MTU) differences within a network flow, which could disrupt the operation of many Internet protocols, most notablyTCP andpath MTU discovery. RFC 2992 analyzed one particular multipath routing strategy involving the assignment offlows throughhashing flow-related data in thepacket header. This solution is designed to avoid these problems by sending all packets from any particular network flow through the same path while balancing multiple flows over multiple paths in general.^[2]

• Link aggregation
• Shortest Path Bridging – establishes multiple forward and reverse paths onEthernet networks.
• Source routing
• TRILL – enables per flow pair-wise load splitting without configuration and user intervention.

• Etutorials: Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) Routing
• Paris-Traceroute: traceroute for ECMP networks
• Dublin-Traceroute: NAT-aware traceroute for ECMP networks
• Traffic Engineering With Equal-Cost-MultiPath: An Algorithmic Perspective

• Routing algorithms

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata