The term for the sum of the costs of all links traversed between source and destination is called what?

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

Answer: (C)

The main idea is measuring a route by the total cost accumulated across all the links it traverses. In routing, each link can have a cost value assigned by the protocol, and the path length (or path cost) is the sum of those costs along the path from source to destination. This distinguishes it from delay (time to send data), bandwidth (capacity), and reliability (success probability). For example, a route with fewer high-cost links can be preferred over one with more links but lower costs, because the total cost is smaller. If every link cost is 1, path length effectively equals the number of hops, but in general it’s the sum of the link costs that defines the path length.