In this paper, we present a new traffic engineering (TE) software framework to analyze, configure, and optimize (with the aid of a linear programming solver) a network for service provisioning. The developed software tool is based on our new data-driven traffic engineering approach that analyzes a large volume of network configuration data generated given the user input. By analyzing the data, one can then make efficient decisions later when designing a traffic engineering solution. We focus on three well-known traffic engineering objective functions: minimum cost routing (MCR), load balancing (LB), and average delay (AD). With this new tool, one can answer numerous traffic engineering questions. For example, what are the differences among the three objective functions? What is the impact of an objective function on link utilization? How many candidate paths are enough to achieve optimality or near-optimality with respect to a specific objective. This new software tool allows us to conveniently perform various experiments and visualize the results for performance analysis. As case studies, this paper presents examples that answer the questions for two traffic engineering problems: (1) how many paths are required to obtain a solution that is within a few percent from the optimal solution and whether that number is fixed for any network size? (2) how the choice of single-path/multi-path routing affects the load in the network? For the first problem, it turns out that the number of paths needed to achieve optimality increases as the number of links in the network increases.

中文翻译：

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一种新的流量工程软件框架：路径基数和多路径对剩余容量的影响

在本文中，我们提出了一种新的流量工程 (TE) 软件框架来分析、配置和优化（借助线性规划求解器）用于服务提供的网络。开发的软件工具基于我们新的数据驱动流量工程方法，该方法分析给定用户输入生成的大量网络配置数据。通过分析数据，人们可以在以后设计交通工程解决方案时做出有效的决策。我们专注于三个著名的流量工程目标函数：最小成本路由（MCR）、负载平衡（LB）和平均延迟（AD）。有了这个新工具，人们可以回答许多交通工程问题。例如，三个目标函数有什么区别？目标函数对链路利用率有何影响？有多少候选路径足以实现特定目标的最优或接近最优。这个新的软件工具使我们能够方便地进行各种实验并将结果可视化以进行性能分析。作为案例研究，本文提供了回答以下两个流量工程问题的示例：(1) 需要多少条路径才能获得与最佳解决方案相差几个百分点的解决方案，以及该数量是否对于任何网络规模都是固定的? (2)单路径/多路径路由的选择如何影响网络中的负载？对于第一个问题，