A first of a plurality of intermediate routing devices is operable to advertise to and/or receive status information from remaining one(s) of the intermediate routing devices. The intermediate routing devices may store and/or analyze the advertised and/or received status information and may make routing decisions based on it. The first routing device may advertise status information for itself and/or for one or more other intermediate routing devices. Data may be routed based on type of data, service level and/or priority associated with the data. The advertised and/or received status information comprises current status information, predicted status information and/or past status information which may be based on one or more of port status, CPU utilization, memory utilization, quality of service (QoS), bandwidth utilization, bandwidth availability, traffic load, congestion, number of connections handled and capability to provide a particular level of service.