Various embodiments implement a set of low overhead mechanisms to enable on-demand routing protocols. The on-demand protocols use route accumulation during discovery floods to discover when better paths have become available even if the paths that the protocols are currently using are not broken. In other words, the mechanisms (or “Route Optimizations”) enable improvements to routes even while functioning routes are available. The Route Optimization mechanisms enable nodes in the network that passively learn routing information to notify nodes that need to know of changes in the routing information when the changes are important. Learning routing information on up-to-date paths and determining nodes that would benefit from the information is performed, in some embodiments, without any explicit control packet exchange. One of the Route Optimization mechanisms includes communicating information describing an improved route from a node where the improved route diverges from a less nearly optimal route.