Optimizing paths in OSPF routing

Open shortest path first (OSPF) is the most commonly used Internet routing protocol. Traffic flows in OSPF routing go along shortest paths and the traffic will be split evenly when several shortest paths are found to the destination. An integer value is assigned for each link as a weight in OSPF networks. Weights highly affect the selection of links in the shortest paths. One of the standard heuristic recommended by Cisco is to set weights inversely proportional to the capacities of links. Overloaded links could appear if they have lower weights, while still other links unutilized. Many balance heuristics were proposed to avoid congestion and utilize un-used network resources. This paper presents an improvement for the evenly balancing heuristic proposed by Fortz and Thorup. Routing efficiency was improved when using our improved heuristic in terms of cost and max-utilization.