Internet Traffic Engineering by OSPF Link Weight Optimization

by

Kagan Gokbayrak
Bilkent University 

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are under pressure to generate more revenue with their existing infrastructures by more efficient use of the bandwidth. Traffic Engineering (TE) is concerned with optimizing the utilization of network resources while enhancing traffic performance. Even though Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is designed to address this need, since it is not widely tested and debugged, ISPs resort to TE methods under Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), which is the most commonly used intra-domain routing protocol. Determining OSPF link weights for optimal network performance is an NP-hard problem. As it is not possible to solve this problem in polynomial time, we present an iterative heuristic method to improve efficiency and performance by minimizing the maximum utilization in the network via a small number of link weight modifications. The results of this method are compared against results of MPLS and simple heuristic methods.