Old Dog Consulting This document describes the principles of traffic engineering (TE) in the Internet. The document is intended to promote better understanding of the issues surrounding traffic engineering in IP networks and the networks that support IP networking, and to provide a common basis for the development of traffic engineering capabilities for the Internet. The principles, architectures, and methodologies for performance evaluation and performance optimization of operational networks are also discussed. This work was first published as RFC 3272 in May 2002. This document obsoletes RFC 3272 by making a complete update to bring the text in line with best current practices for Internet traffic engineering and to include references to the latest relevant work in the IETF.