to when a path to a packet 39 s destination is determined an exemplary form of routing information is a routing table including a 3 tuple having a destination a next hop node and a distance to the destination where the entire path to the destination is determined by the hop by hop decision of a series of nodes towards the destination the destination and next hop node may be expressed in terms of a network address e g an internet protocol ip address the distance may be expressed in terms of a number of hops needed to reach the destination as a sum of weights of links between nodes as described herein etc the routing information can be available in different forms depending on the networking technologies e g route update messages in distance vector protocols route announcements in path vector protocols route caches in some ad hoc routing protocols forwarding tables in mpls multi protocol label switching lsr 39 s label switched routers etc embodiments of the present disclosure are applicable to these technologies regardless of how routing information is stored in a node or how it is obtained from a node using the routing information and the.