Routing algorithms may make use of weighted decisions based on congestion and hop count (e.g., Universal Globally Adaptive Load-Balancing (UGAL) routing algorithms) to route data packets through nodes in a network. These routing algorithms may estimate the expected remaining delay in routing the data packets by multiplying the hop count and congestion of the network and choose the route that yields the lowest weight, which approximates the lowest delay between the source node and the destination node.
Adaptive routing algorithms may select between minimal and non-minimal routing according to current network load. Adaptive routing algorithms may select minimal routes when the traffic in the network needs no load balancing or is already load balanced. Adaptive routing algorithms may select non-minimal routes when the traffic needs additional load balancing to reach the theoretical throughput provided by the network topology. Therefore, weighted decision routing algorithms compare network state representing minimal and non-minimal routes. Some weighted decision routing algorithms may add a bias value as part of the weight to non-minimal routes to artificially make them more or less desirable for routing packets. Adding a fixed value biasing may increase the performance of load balanced traffic and degrade the performance of non-load balanced traffic. A different value may have the opposite effect of degrading the performance of load balanced traffic and increasing the performance of non-load balanced traffic.