The objective of the invention is to provide a method and apparatus for controlling traffic. Compared with the prior art, the method provided by the invention comprises the following steps: for a to-be-sent data packet, calculating a target waiting time for sending a target link of the to-be-sent data packet; if the target waiting time is less than or equal to a transmission delay threshold, directly sending the to-be-sent data packet to a to-be-sent queue in the target link; and if the target waiting time is greater than the transmission delay threshold, sending the to-be-sent data packet tothe to-be-sent queue in the target link after waiting for the delay time, so that a buffer area is also formed at the sending end, and congestion control is performed by using the transmission delay threshold. If there are multiple candidate links, a candidate waiting time used by each corresponding candidate link in the multiple candidate links for sending the to-be-sent data packet is respectively calculated, the candidate link with the shortest candidate waiting time is selected as the target link, and the candidate waiting time corresponding to the target link is used as the target waitingtime, and a universal traffic control algorithm is introduced and can be applied to different layers of a protocol.