For traffic engineering in a network, such as reducing the congestion in heavy loaded links, bypass links that are down or reduce transit costs, the invention proposes a method for controlling data communication, wherein a central network element (100) associated with a network provider generates and updates a representation (130) of the network by retrieving network information (110) and/or by monitoring data communication within the network, from a client network element (180) a request is transmitted to the central network element (100), identifying a source network element and at least two destination network elements, for each destination network element a ranking value is determined by the central network element (100) based on the representation (130) of the network, an ordered list is generated based on the respective ranking values and is transmitted to the client network element (180), and based on the ordered list at least one of the destination network elements is selected for data communication with the source network element.
The invention further proposes a system and a network element for performing the inventive method.