Abstract: This paper provides an investigation of the routing rules with shortest paths and alternative routes. In the study the average delay in the network, the average accessibility in the network and the implementation effort for the routing protocol are assumed to be the main performance values. The advantages and disadvantages of the rules mentioned above will be presented and discussed. The study demonstrates that the choice of a routing rule in computer networks represents an optimization problem. The obtained results of this paper yield an important contributions to the solution of this problem.
Key words: Communication network, routing, computer communication network.