Potato routing

In Internet routing, two paradigms, informally called hot potato and cold potato, exemplify the operational principles used in developing routing policy. When a routing domain or autonomous system receives a packet, under hot potato, it gets rid of it as quickly as possible. Hot potato is also called closest exit routing, and does minimize the workload required to route the information.

Cold potato, also called best exit routing, involves having the routing domain or autonomous system keep control of the packet as long as it can route it over links of known performance and traffic, so it can control the per-hop behavior encountered by the packet. The exit point from the current routing domain will also be selected to have the best available external path to the destination.