What is equal-cost load balancing?

• A. The routing table contains a single destination network, but has multiple exit interfaces—one for each equal-cost path.
• B. The router uses only a single exit interface per destination
• C. It distributes traffic evenly across all interfaces regardless of metrics
• D. It selects paths randomly without considering metrics

Answer: (A)

Equal-cost load balancing means there are multiple paths to the same destination that have the same routing metric, and the router uses more than one of those paths to forward traffic. In this setup, the routing table stores one destination with several equal-cost next-hops or exit interfaces, allowing packets to be sent over different links to share the load. A hashing mechanism typically distributes flows across the available paths so each path isn’t overused, improving both bandwidth utilization and redundancy. This is why the correct description is a single destination entry that has multiple exit interfaces—one for each equal-cost path. The other options don’t fit because they describe using only a single path, ignoring the equal-cost condition, or randomly selecting paths without respect to the equal metrics.