SUMMARYIn this paper, the authors present a novel algorithm for computing bandwidth guaranteed paths for traffic engineering in WiMAX IEEE 802.16 standard based networks using the mesh topology. The underlying algorithm fulfills routing requests ‘on the fly’ without a priori knowledge of future requests. This problem is motivated by the need for efficient handling of traffic and network resource utilization. The key idea behind the solution is the use of heuristic methods to defer routing through certain nodes, which have a higher chance of getting selected because of hop constraints, so that they can be prevented from congestion. Simulation‐based performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm performs well in comparison with the selected benchmarks on metrics such as the number of rejected requests and the active links present in the network. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.