Examples described herein relate to a packet processing device that includes circuitry to: request network resource consumption data from one or more other packet processing devices by indication in a header of a reliable transport protocol and transmit the request in a packet that includes the indication in the header. In some examples, the header includes an option field of a transmission control protocol (TCP) packet. In some examples, the network resource consumption data includes a largest network resource consumption data in a path from a sender to a receiver, and potentially one or more next largest network resource consumption data.