A neighbor route is a destination reachable directly on a registered local path.

Direct neighbors are stored in the neighbor table.

A learned route is a route advertisement received from another node.

Learned routes are stored in the forwarding table as route candidates. Multiple candidates may exist for the same destination.

Example:

• destination A via next hop B
• destination A via next hop C
• destination A via next hop D

For unicast frames, MTRP resolves egress in this order:

1. use an already-valid explicit egress path if one is present
2. try direct neighbor resolution
3. try forwarding-table resolution
4. mark the frame unroutable if no valid path exists

Preferred routes are populated when a forwarded route is actually selected.

This means a node may have many learned routes in the forwarding table while the preferred route table remains empty until forwarding is needed.

If all nodes can hear each other directly:

• direct routes usually have the lowest metric
• forwarded alternatives still appear as learned candidates
• direct routes should normally be selected over indirect ones