Adaptive Load Balancing With OSPF

The objective of load balancing is to move traffic from congested links to other parts of the network. If the traffic demands are known, the load balancing can be formulated as an optimization problem. The resulting traffic allocation can be realized in the networks that use explicit routes, such as MPLS-networks. It has recently been found that a similar load balancing is possible to be implemented even in the IP networks based on OSPF-routing by adjusting the OSPF-weights of the links and the traffic splitting ratios in the routers. However, if the traffic demands are unknown or they may change rapidly, another approach is needed. This paper studies adaptive load balancing in OSPF-networks based on measured link loads.