Better Alternatives to OSPF Routing

The current standard for intra-domain network routing, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), suffers from a number of problems--the tunable parameters (the weights) are hard to optimize, the chosen paths are not robust under changes in traffic or network state, and some network links are overused at the expense of others. We present prototypical scenarios that illustrate these problems. Then, we propose several variants of a protocol to eliminate or alleviate them and demonstrate the improvements in performance under those scenarios. We also prove that these protocols never perform significantly worse than OSPF and show that for at least a limited class of network topologies, it is possible to find efficiently the optimal weight settings. Some of the problems with OSPF are well-known; indeed, there are several routing protocols that perform better than OSPF in routing quality (i.e., in terms of congestion, delay, etc.). OSPF's popularity persists in part because of its efficiency with...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: ALGORITHMICA
• Authors: Jessica H. Fong, Anna C. Gilbert, Sampath Kannan, Martin J. Strauss
• Keywords: ALGORITHMICA 2005, Open Shortest Path, OSPF, Routing