Routing schemes are provided for a communication network. In one scheme, destination terminals and associated neighboring terminals are listed in a routing control cache at each communication terminal in the network, and packets are routed toward the destination terminal through the associated neighboring terminals. In another scheme, a single path from a source terminal to a destination terminal is automatically expanded into multiple paths. In yet another scheme, packets are routed as long as this does not increase the number of hops to the destination terminal. These schemes enable multiple paths to be established by a simple procedure not requiring complex distance calculations. In still another scheme, routing is restricted to the shortest path and paths up to a given number of hops longer than the shortest path, permitting paths to diverge in multiple directions from the source and destination terminals.