Performance of new link state advertisement mechanisms in routing protocols with traffic engineering extensions

The prevalent use of best-effort topology driven IP routing protocols with shortest path calculations can often lead to serious imbalance of packet traffic distribution when least cost paths converge on the same set of links, leading to unacceptable delays or packet loss even in the presence of feasible paths over less utilized links. Recently proposed enhancements to common routing protocols are promising to overcome such shortcomings by providing the means to distribute link state information that is more pertinent to traffic engineering in routed networks. This article presents several key results on the performance of the recently proposed OSPF-TE, with particular emphasis on OSPF-TE protocol traffic overhead and the impact of new link state advertisement triggering mechanisms on traffic-engineered routing accuracy.