Enriching the poor man´s traffic engineering: Virtual link provisioning for optimal OSPF TE

In this paper we introduce a framework that substantially enhances OSPF Traffic Engineering by augmenting its ability to handle load balancing situations. Our solution uses only unmodified OSPF ECMP and does not require the installation of any new hardware or software elements by the network operator. The main problem with ECMP is that it can only divide the traffic in equal proportion among the least-cost paths. This is overcame in our Virtual Link Provisioning Framework by a simple technique: setting up virtual links alongside the existing ones, thereby tricking OSPF into non-even load-sharing. In this work we facilitate each network node to split the traffic - formerly it was only possible at the sources. This way we put considerably less requirements on the network infrastructure, yet achieve significantly better overall performance.