On Improving the Accuracy of OSPF Traffic Engineering

The conventional forwarding rule used by IP networks is to always choose the path with the shortest length – in terms of administrative link weights assigned to the links – to forward traffic. Lately, it has been proposed to use shortest-path-first routing to implement Traffic Engineering in IP networks, promising with a big boost in the profitability of the legacy network infrastructure. The idea is to set the link weights so that the shortest paths, and the traffic thereof, follow the paths designated by the operator. Unfortunately, traditional methods to calculate the link weights usually produce a bunch of superfluous shortest paths, often leading to congestion along the unconsidered paths. In this paper, we introduce and develop novel methods to increase the accuracy of this process and, by means of extensive simulations, we show that our proposed solution produces remarkably high quality link weights.

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