The sum of the costs associated with each link traversed is called what?

• A. Reliability
• B. Bandwidth
• C. Delay
• D. Path Length

Answer: (D)

In routing and graph theory, the total “expense” of a route is determined by summing the cost assigned to each link along that path. This accumulated value is known as the path length (often called the path cost in routing algorithms). Since the question describes adding up the costs on every link traversed, it matches the concept of path length exactly.

The other ideas refer to different properties: reliability is about how likely a link or path is to function, bandwidth is the capacity of a link, and delay is the time to traverse a link. While delays can contribute to the costs you assign, the specific sum of per-link costs that yields a single total for the route is the path length.