In one embodiment, a local node in a communication network determines a set of its neighbor nodes, and determines a respective occurrence frequency at which each particular neighbor node is to be probed based on a rate of change in distance between the local node and the particular neighbor node. The local node may then probe each particular neighbor node according to the respective occurrence frequency to determine the rate of change in distance between the local node and each particular neighbor node, and one or more routing metrics for reaching each particular neighbor node. As such, the local node may select, based on the probing, a suitable preferred next-hop node of the set of neighbor nodes for a corresponding routing topology.