Nodes for managing congestion and traffic flow by considering the minimization of link utilization values

A traffic management system operable to route traffic along a path by:

• monitoring traffic demands from a source node of an information network to a destination node of the network, including bandwidths associated with each of the traffic demands;
• determining for each traffic demand and for a given link of the network, that portion of the bandwidth associated with each traffic demand which portion is provided by the given link;
• determining a maximum value of link utilization among all links of the network, where link utilization is defined as the amount of bandwidth used by all traffic demands routed through a given link with respect to a total capacity of the link;
• calculating a cost metric for each link of the network based on information comprising the traffic demand and maximum value of link utilization;
• selecting a path with consideration to minimizing the maximum value of link utilization based on each cost metric;
• and
• routing the traffic demands across the path.