Optimal routing for efficient Internet networks

Abstract

In order to face the explosion of traffic in the Internet, the administrators who had a tendency to oversize their network have turned to new protocols aiming at better control of the routing and a better distribution of the traffic. New routing paradigms (MPLS) allowing explicit tunnel definitions are slowly emerging in the Internet community. However, the routing tables are still very often defined according to classical protocols (OSPF, IS-IS, . . .). In those protocols, the routing paths are defined as shortest paths according to weights (called administrative weights) associated to the network links and arbitrarily defined by the network administrator. In these networks, the general routing pattern is hence entirely defined by the weights. We investigate the problem of jointly determining network weights and routing paths in a given capacitated network in order to optimize a certain network performance criterion. Each traffic demand is routed on a single shortest path.