Determining source route requires accumulating the address of each device between the source and destination during route discovery. The accumulated path information is cached by nodes processing the route discovery packets. The learned paths are used to route packets. To accomplish source routing, the routed packets contain the address of each device the packet will traverse. This may result in high overhead for long paths or large addresses, like IPv6. To avoid using source routing, DSR optionally defines a flow id option that allows packets to be forwarded on a hop-by-hop basis.