Heavy-hitter flows or Cheetah Flows (CF), which are high-rate flows can result in increased packet losses and delay in general Internet traffic. A Cheetah Flow Traffic Engineering System (CFTES) is presented, which can dynamically compute a heavy-hitter or CF threshold using information from the general background traffic. The system works in conjunction with a Cheetah Flow Identification Network Function (CFINF) to detect CFs at high-link rates using an SDN controller for actions involving redirection of CFs to a lower priority scavenger queue.