How does a distance-vector routing protocol determine the next hop for a destination?

• A. By consulting a global routing table and selecting the hop with the smallest advertised metric from all neighbors.
• B. By taking the neighbor's advertised distance to the destination and adding the cost to reach that neighbor.
• C. By using only the direct link cost to the destination, ignoring neighbor metrics.
• D. By performing a full Dijkstra computation on each update.

Answer: (B)

Distance-vector routing determines the next hop by evaluating, for each destination, the total cost to reach that destination through each directly connected neighbor. The router adds its cost to reach a neighbor to the neighbor’s advertised distance to the destination. The neighbor that gives the smallest total cost becomes the next hop for that destination, and the router stores that neighbor in its routing table as the way to reach it. This reflects a distributed, Bellman-Ford–style computation rather than a global view or a full graph search. So the correct approach uses the sum of “cost to neighbor” plus “neighbor’s distance to destination.” This differs from methods that rely on a single global table or that run a full Dijkstra calculation on each update.