pub const ESTABLISHED_ROUTE_EXTRA_HOPS: u8 = 0;Expand description
Flood-hop slack granted on top of what an established route to a peer already needs.
A route learned from inbound traffic tells the sender how far away the peer was, so a unicast that follows it does not need the wide flood budget of a first-contact packet. Slack past that distance buys the send a backstop: a path that has grown one hop longer — a repeater moved, a link that now needs one more relay — still gets through and re-teaches the correct route.
Zero spends nothing on that backstop. An established route is transmitted as exactly what it costs, and a route that has gone stale is recovered by the ack timeout rather than by a hop bolted onto every packet: route recovery compares what the application asked for against what the MAC narrowed it to, so a peer that moved is re-flooded on retry. A send with no ack coming has no such recovery and no repeat to listen for — that is the reliability this trades away for the airtime.