Robust traffic engineering using l-balanced weight-settings in OSPF/IS-IS

Internet traffic volumes continue to grow at a great rate, now pushed by video and TV distribution in the networks. This brings up the need for traffic engineering mechanisms to better control the traffic. The objective of traffic engineering is to avoid congestion in the network and make good use of available resources by controlling and optimising the routing function. The challenge for traffic engineering in IP networks is to cope with the dynamics of Internet traffic demands. Today, the main alternative for intra-domain traffic engineering in IP networks is to use different methods for setting the weights in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. In this paper we revisit the weight setting approach to traffic engineering but with focus on robustness. We propose l-balanced weight settings that route the traffic on the shortest paths possible but make sure that no link is utilised to more than a given level l. This gives efficient routing of traffic and controlled spare capacity to handle unpredictable changes in traffic. We present a heuristic search method for finding l-balanced weight settings and show that it works well in real network scenarios.