This thesis discusses the implications of the traffic characteristics on interdomain traffic engineering with BGP. We first provide an overview of the interdomain traffic control problem. Then, we present results concerning the characteristics of the interdomain traffic, based on the analysis of real traffic traces gathered from non-transit ASes. We discuss the implications of the topological properties of the traffic on interdomain traffic engineering. Based on this knowledge of the traffic characteristics, we go on to study the complexity of designing interdomain traffic engineering techniques by defining the problem as an optimization problem. We show that designing traffic engineering techniques is possible but that several issues inherent to the current interdomain architecture make the task complex. Finally, we evaluate the current state-of-the-art of interdomain traffic engineering and discuss how we envision its future. (FSA 3)--UCL, 2004