A connection between two High-Performance Routing (HPR) nodes that may traverse one or more intermediate HPR nodes and links. The connection endpoints provide error recovery and adaptive rate-based flow control for the connection traffic, and nondisruptive switching of the underlying physical path in the case of route outage. The intermediate HPR nodes minimize their routing overhead using automatic network routing (ANR) protocols, which rely on header information to permit efficient source routing and prioritized transmission along the RTP connection.