The main goal of Internet traffic engineering is to efficiently optimize the performance of operational networks in order to avoid the well-known shortcomings of the typical destination-based IP routing. Traffic engineering attempts to reduce or even avoid congestion hot spots and to improve resource utilization across the backbone IP network. During the last years traffic engineering has become an inevitable tool concerning performance optimization in large Internet backbones. The core objective of this paper is to give an overview of the architectures and mechanisms for traffic engineering.