now be set as link cost in addition to use of traditional routing matrices such as bandwidth speed latency etc for an egp routing protocol such as bgp energy cost routing metric can be used as multi exit discriminator med value note that the energy cost metric can be automatically calculated and used by routing protocol or it can be provided as a configurable entity in a command line interface cli so users have full control over it fig4 depicts a network topology 400 according to embodiments of the present invention the network topology in fig4 shows router a 410 router b 420 router c 430 and router z 440 the topology in fig4 is used to show an example where router a 410 wants to talk to router z 440 in this simplified example there are two possible paths a 410 to b 420 to z 440 shown with a solid line or a 410 to c 430 to z 440 shown with a dashed line the above example will assume that each path is an equal cost path meaning the two paths would have the same cost in a prior art protocol therefore traffic would be split between the paths employing embodiments of the present invention each of routers a 410 b 420 c 430 and z 440 will have a normalized power.