The invention discloses a topology information acquiring method for a distributed network, which comprises that: an initial node in the distributed network sends topology acquiring request message to an adjacent node; after any node X in the distributed network receives the topology acquiring request message, the following processing is performed: the node X sends the topology acquiring request message to M adjacent nodes of the node; the M adjacent nodes are other nodes except the nodes for sending the topology acquiring request message to the node X in the adjacent nodes of the node X; and after topology acquiring response message returned by the M adjacent nodes is received or the preset time is reached, if at least one received topology acquiring response message contains network topology information, the node X returns the network topology information recorded by the node and the topology acquiring response message containing the network topology information in the topology acquiring response message received by the node to one of the nodes sending the topology acquiring request message to the node X, wherein M is more than or equal to 1.