  Traffic Engineering (TE) leverages information of network traffic to generate
a routing scheme optimizing the traffic distribution so as to advance network
performance. However, optimize the link weights for OSPF to the offered traffic
is an known NP-hard problem. In this paper, motivated by the fairness concept
of congestion control, we firstly propose a new generic objective function,
where various interests of providers can be extracted with different parameter
settings. And then, we model the optimal TE as the utility maximization of
multi-commodity flows with the generic objective function and theoretically
show that any given set of optimal routes corresponding to a particular
objective function can be converted to shortest paths with respect to a set of
positive link weights. This can be directly configured on OSPF-based protocols.
On these bases, we employ the Network Entropy Maximization(NEM) framework and
develop a new OSPF-based routing protocol, SPEF, to realize a flexible way to
split traffic over shortest paths in a distributed fashion. Actually, comparing
to OSPF, SPEF only needs one more weight for each link and provably achieves
optimal TE. Numerical experiments have been done to compare SPEF with the
current version of OSPF, showing the effectiveness of SPEF in terms of link
utilization and network load distribution.

Networking and Internet Architecture