Abstract
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is the most widely used Interior Gateway Protocol in IP networks. The OSPF protocol directs the Internet traffic along the shortest paths that are defined by the links weight. Traffic engineering is responsible for improving the network performance by optimizing the objective function that we give. The objective function that minimizes the maximal link utilization is usually adopted to avoid the network congestion. The main concern of this thesis is to formulate the model of OSPF routing, and further evaluate the performance of different approaches. In addition, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the routing problems by optimizing OSPF weights. Experimental results indicate that the optimization algorithm could lead to good load balancing, and make efficient utilization of network resources. According to the best weights setting and the traffic allocation, we show how to manage and adjust the OSPF weights in a systematic procedure.