Abstract

We compare and evaluate how well-known and novel networkwide objective functions for Traffic Engineering (TE) algorithms fulfil TE requirements. To compare the objective functions we model the TE problem as a linear program and solve it to optimality, thus finding for each objective function the best possible target of any heuristic TE algorithm. We show that all the objective functions are not equivalent and some are far better than others. Considering the preferences a network operator may have, we show which objective functions are adequate or not. Peer reviewed

Abstract

We compare and evaluate how well-known and novel network-wide objective functions for Traffic Engineering (TE) algorithms fulfil TE requirements. To compare the objective functions we model the TE problem as a linear program and solve it to optimality, thus finding for each objective function the best possible target of any heuristic TE algorithm. Our first results on the GEANT network suggest that they can give quite different results.