In urban traffic networks, the unbalanced traffic distribution is one of the main factors leading to traffic congestion. In this paper, by following the idea of consensus, we propose a distributed control strategy to reach local consensus for the links thus to balance the traffic of the whole network. In view of the spatial and temporal characteristics of congestion propagation, the states of links are optimized to reach consensus with their neighbors. The simple linear model makes it possible for the algorithm to implement in large scale urban traffic networks. Furthermore, being realised in a distributed way, the extendibility and flexibility of the control strategy is achieved. At last, our control scheme shows the effectiveness in comparison with fixed-time signal control by conducting it in Corsim software.