The effects of data center traffic characteristics on data center traffic engineering is not well understood. In particular, it is unclear how existing traffic engineering techniques perform under various traffic patterns, namely how do the computed routes differ from the optimal routes. The authors’ study reveals that existing traffic engineering techniques perform 15% to 20% worse than the optimal solution. They find that these techniques suffer mainly due to their inability to utilize global knowledge about flow characteristics and make coordinated decision for scheduling flows. To this end, they have developed MicroTE, a system that adapts to traffic variations by leveraging the short term and partial predictability of the traffic matrix.