Determining Feasible Link Weight Systems under Various Objectives for OSPF Networks

An important traffic engineering problem for OSPF networks is the determination of optimal link weights. Needless to say, this can depend on the traffic engineering objective. Regardless, often a variety of performance measures may be of interest to a network provider due to their impact on the network. In this paper, we consider different objectives and discuss how they impact the determination of the link weights and different performance measures. In particular, we propose a composite objective function; furthermore, we present a Lagrangian-relaxation based dual approach to determine the link weights system. We then consider different performance measures and discuss the effectiveness of different objectives through extensive computational studies. We find that our proposed composite objective function with Lagrangian-relaxation based dual approach is very effective in meeting different performance criteria.