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The Internet traffic volume continues to grow at a great rate, now driven by video and TV distribution. For network operators it is important to avoid congestion in the network, and to meet service level agreements with their customers.  This thesis presents work on two methods operators can use to reduce links loads in their networks: traffic engineering and content caching.

This thesis studies access patterns for TV and video and the potential for caching.  The investigation is done both using simulation and by analysis of logs from a large TV-on-Demand system over four months.

The results show that there is a small set of programs that account for a large fraction of the requests and that a comparatively small local cache can be used to significantly reduce the peak link loads during prime time. The investigation also demonstrates how the popularity of programs changes over time and shows that the access pattern in a TV-on-Demand system very much depends on the content type.

For traffic engineering the objective is to avoid congestion in the network and to make better use of available resources by adapting the routing to the current traffic situation. The main challenge for traffic engineering in IP networks is to cope with the dynamics of Internet traffic demands.

This thesis proposes L-balanced routings that route the traffic on the shortest paths possible but make sure that no link is utilised to more than a given level L. L-balanced routing gives efficient routing of traffic and controlled spare capacity to handle unpredictable changes in traffic.  We present an L-balanced routing algorithm and a heuristic search method for finding L-balanced weight settings for the legacy routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. We show that the search and the resulting weight settings work well in real network scenarios.