Patent ID: 8027275

Claim:
A method of determining a route in a communications network, comprising the steps of: a) broadcasting control packets from a plurality of nodes via a plurality of routes to a local node, each of said control packets containing a first metric value of a first category and a second metric value of a second category, said first and second categories respectively representing transmission quality and hop count of a corresponding one of said routes; b) receiving, at said local node, control packets from said plurality of nodes; and c) multiplying the second metric value of each of the received control packets by a coefficient of said first category and summing the first metric value and the multiplied second metric value of each of the received control packets to produce a plurality of summed metric values corresponding in number to said plurality of routes and selecting at least one of said routes according to said plurality of summed metric values, wherein the first metric value and the second metric value have different units of measurement.