In operational networks, nodes are connected via multiple links for load
sharing and redundancy. This is done to make sure that a failure of a link does
not disconnect or isolate some parts of the network. However, link failures
have an effect on routing, as the routers find alternate paths for the traffic
originally flowing through the link which has failed. This effect is severe in
case of failure of a critical link in the network, such as backbone links or
the links carrying higher traffic loads. When routing is done using the Open
Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol, the original weight selection for
the normal state topology may not be as efficient for the failure state. In
this paper, we investigate the single link failure issue with an objective to
find a weight setting which results in efficient routing in normal and failure
states. We engineer Tabu Search Iterative heuristic using two different
implementation strategies to solve the OSPF weight setting problem for link
failure scenarios. We evaluate these heuristics and show through experimental
results that both heuristics efficiently handle weight setting for the failure
state. A comparison of both strategies is also presented.