forth the first proposition is that there is no out of order delivery of packets sent from the source device to the destination device if these packets traverse the same route unless a link failure occurs and causes a route change at a router in between its transmissions of these packets a second proposition is that if two consecutive packets traverse different routes they may arrive out of order at the destination the probability of out of order delivery is maximized when the size of first probe packet is maximized and that of second probe packet is minimized and a third proposition is that if two consecutive probe packets p 1 and p 2 of respective lengths l max and l min e g the largest and smallest packet lengths supported by node r 0 traverse different routes yet arrive in order at the destination the path traversed by p 2 experiences much larger queuing and or transmission delay than p 1 in this case it may be of little gain to split the data traffic across the two paths traversed by p 1 and p 2 since the throughput improvement is marginal assume source device 202 is configured to initiate a data intensive application such as a file transfer that sends a large amount of traffic e g 10 mbytes from its port x to destination device 204 according to one aspect s d is defined as a set of destination ports p the destination device 204 is listening to and can receive data from the source device 202 in this embodiment the invention allows the source device 202 or other associated device to discover n paths each served by a destination port in s n d s n d u2282 s d of the destination device 204.