Traffic engineering refers to the performance optimization of operational networks. On one hand, traffic offered between origin and destination nodes loads the network and on the other hand, this traffic has to be carried in the network in such a way that performance objectives are fulfilled. In this thesis, we study three different problem areas related to traffic engineering covering traffic characterization, load balancing and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. In the first part of this thesis we characterize the measured traffic on a link in the Finnish backbone network Funet. Traffic on the link is first considered as an aggregate and then split into origin-destination pairs based on the IP addresses of the packets. At a fine level of s...