Abstract Traffic capacity of one network strongly depends on the link’s bandwidth allocation strategy. In previous bandwidth allocation mechanisms, once one link’s bandwidth is allocated, it will be fixed throughout the overall traffic transmission process. However, the traffic load of every link changes from time to time. In this paper, with finite total bandwidth resource of the network, we propose to dynamically allocate the total bandwidth resource in which each link’s bandwidth is proportional to the queue length of the output buffer of the link per time step. With plenty of data packets in the network, the traffic handling ability of all links of the network achieves full utilization. The theoretical analysis and the extensive simulation results on complex networks are consistent. This work is valuable for network service providers to improve network performance or to do reasonable network design efficiently.