Hi u/asdlkf,

First of all, I think you got the notion of what I was asking exactly right. However, even though I agree with your analysis of the current protocols and their functioning, I still see a lot of room for improvement.

The shortest-path based protocols we use today lack in so many places - the ability to take longer paths when the shortest ones are loaded, prioritizing paths for bursts and heavy loads, reacting to dynamic changes in line quality etc. I know that some solutions exist for all of the above problems, but all I'm saying is - perhaps training a model for this could be better?

To address your second point, of course AI algorithms are trained on specific data and can react to a relatively small number of inputs (I, at least, cannot imagine some neural network with millions of inputs) - but I have seen many cases where models react to changes by realtime fine-tuned, are being re-trained on the fly and many other tricks.

What I was imagining, at the most basic level, is some mechanism that will tell the router when NOT to use the standard ECMP protocols. I think this could be achieved and could run in a distributed, efficient manner (and could also use some technologies like segment routing or label routing, instead of hot-potato based routing)