  This paper presents a scalability and load balancing study of the All-Path
protocols, a family of distributed switching protocols based on path
exploration. ARP-Path is the main protocol and it explores every possible path
reaching from source to destination by using ARP messages, selecting the lowest
latency path. Flow-Path and Bridge-Path are respectively the flow-based and
bridge-based versions, instead of the source address-based approach of
ARP-Path. While preserving the main advantages of ARP-Path, Flow-Path has the
advantages of full independence of flows for path creation, guaranteeing path
symmetry and increased path diversity. While Bridge-Path increases scalability
by reducing forwarding table entries at core bridges. We compare the
characteristics of each protocol and the convenience of using each one
depending on the topology and the type of traffic. Finally, we prove their load
balancing capabilities analytically and via simulation.
