Abstract The desire for configuring well‐managed open shortest path first (OSPF) routes to handle the communication needs in the contemporary business world with larger networks and changing service requirements has opened the way to use traffic engineering tools with the OSPF protocol. Moreover, anticipating possible shifts in expected traffic demands while using network resources efficiently has started to gain more attention. We take these two crucial issues into consideration and study the weight setting problem for OSPF routing problem with polyhedral demands. Our motivation is to optimize the link weight metric such that the minimum cost routing uses shortest paths with equal cost multipath splitting and the routing decisions are robust to possible fluctuations in demands. In addition to a compact mixed integer programming model, we provide an algorithmic approach with two variations to tackle the problem. We present several test results for these two strategies and discuss whether we could make our weight‐managed OSPF comparable to unconstrained routing under polyhedral demand uncertainty. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, 2012

This short paper presents a preliminary work of an ongoing study on the optimization of link weights in the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP). We present a column generation approach for the general routing problem, which provides a lower bound on the optimal value of the IGP weight optimization problem.