Impact of Link Weight Ranges on OSPF Weight Solutions

Finding a set of optimal link weights for OSPF routing is a NP-hard problem. Many heuristic algorithms have been proposed in the past. In this paper, we study the impact of link weight ranges on OSPF weight solutions. Experiments were conducted on three commonly used types of synthetic networks for a set of link weight ranges. Three heuristic algorithms with different search mechanisms were run independently for each network instance and for each link weight range. Based on the numerical results, we assess the link weight solutions with respect to solution quality, equal-cost multi-path and hop count, and then present guidelines on the choice of an acceptable link weight range, i.e. the minimum and maximum weight values.