A manner of selecting communication traffic paths through a LAN, WAN, or similar communication network. Traffic received at a source bridge is forwarded to a destination bridge along a communication path selected from a plurality of possible, preferably EHEC paths. The paths may be discovered by a breadth first search and stored in a path selection table in association with a sequential index number. The paths are selected, for example by assigning a path to a VLAN by determining V mod N, comparing the result to indices on a path selection table that associates an unique index with each of the plurality of communication paths, and selecting the path associated with an index equal to the result, wherein N is the number of paths in the plurality of paths and V is a group identifier. The selected paths may be stored in the path selection table in association with the respective VLAN, and any received traffic for that VLAN is forwarded along the selected path.