Existing networks are becoming increasingly congested as a growing number of users seek access to the vast amount of information available on the Internet. At the same time, emerging multimedia applications, such as video conferencing, interactive television, and video-on-demand are expected to further test the limits of current network infrastructures. There is an immediate need for the development of new, evolutionary high-capacity networks which are capable of supporting these growing bandwidth requirements. Wavelengthdivision multiplexing (WDM) is a promising solution for satisfying this bandwidth bottleneck. As WDM deployment becomes widespread, new network architectures and protocols which take advantage of WDM's capabilities will need to be developed. This dissertation investigates network architectures and protocols for WDM networks, with the goals of measuring the performance of existing approaches and of developing new architectures and protocols which provide improved performance as well as support for services such as multicasting.

Optical access has long been considered a final solution to the problem of upgrading the current bottlenecked access to the one capable of delivering future broadband integrated services due to the huge capacity of an optical fiber. Because