Yuval,
> In the paper below we give an example that shows that regardless of
> the weights you assign to links in OSPF the possible gap between MPLS
> TE capabilities and OSPF which equally splits the traffic among
> multiple paths in as high as can be.
Yup, this is a very key point.
> In other words, weight setting for OSPF cannot replace MPLS as
> a traffic engineering tool.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this conclusion. The fact that the
gap can be very high in the worst case does not imply that the gap is
high in practice -- for "realistic" topologies (whatever that means)
and traffic patterns. This is the main theoretical issue that I am
curious about (but not equipped to study myself) -- what aspects of a
topology tend to make the gap less significant? High bisection
bandwidth? Reasonable balance between the topology and the traffic
demands (i.e., not terribly skewed loads)? Relatively low diameter?
These things seem true in practice and, intuitively, they seem to hint
that the worst-case gap probably won't be realized in practice.
-- Jen
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