Patent ID: 8743768

Claim:
A method, comprising: detecting, at a source device, a packet flow that meets criteria for multi-path forwarding; inserting a probe packet into a header of the packet flow; forwarding the packet flow on a primary path from the source device to a destination device, the probe packet carrying a multi-path forwarding indicator and a topology accumulation indicator to cause a plurality of transit devices along the primary path to add their respective local neighbor topology to the forwarded probe packet, and also to cause the destination device to compute a diverse path from the primary path based on the accumulated local neighbor topologies in the probe packet, wherein the probe packet is an initial packet of the packet flow; receiving, at the source device, a returned diverse path as computed by the destination device in response to the probe packet; and forwarding the packet flow on the primary path and the diverse path from the source device to the destination device according to the multi-path forwarding.