Recall from Chapter 3, "Static Routing," that load balancing is the practice of distributing traffic among
multiple paths to the same destination in order to use bandwidth efficiently. As an example of the
usefulness of load balancing, consider Figure 4.1 again. All the networks in Figure 4.1 are reachable from
two paths. If a device on 192.168.2.0 sends a stream of packets to a device on 192.168.6.0, router A may
send them all via router B or router C. In both cases, the network is 1 hop away. However, sending all
packets on a single route probably is not the most efficient use of available bandwidth. Instead, load
balancing should be implemented to alternate traffic between the two paths. As noted in Chapter 3, load
balancing can be equal cost or unequal cost and per packet or per destination .