Distributed traffic engineering route exchanger routers (TE-Xs) are used in an open shortest path first (OSPF) routing area to collect Traffic Engineering Link State Advertisements (TE-LSAs) and exchange the TE-LSAs with other TE-Xs. TE-Xs store TE-LSAs and compute explicit routes required by edge routers. A single point of failure that exists when a single centralized TE database is used is thereby eliminated. The TE-Xs peer with other TE-Xs in a routing area and exchange TE-LSAs to keep traffic engineering link state databases (TE-LSDBs) synchronized. Network resources are preserved for payload traffic and resource reservation collisions are reduced.