Modern networking technologies require dynamic allocation of network resources to traffic such as to ensure a certain service quality. For most data networking technologies, this problem is NP-complete. We present a novel abstraction technique that allows modelling network resource allocation as a constraint satisfaction problem. It thus becomes possible to apply a large body of heuristic techniques which significantly outperform existing techniques. We furthermore show how the abstraction admits an agent structure that allows implementing distributed resource allocation with a low communication overhead.