The last decade witnessed a wild growth in Internet traffic, caused by bandwidth-hungry applications such as YouTube, P2P, and VoIP. This explosive increase is expected to proceed with an annual rate of 34% in the near future, which is a huge challenge for the Internet's infrastructure. One way to provide relief is advances in optical networking and switching, by which abundant bandwidth can be provided in an energy-efficient manner. For instance, with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, each fiber can carry a mass of wavelengths with bandwidth up to 100 Gbits/s or higher. To keep up with the traffic explosion, simply scaling the number of fibers and/or wavelengths per fiber results in a scalability issue in WDM networks. One of the major motivations of this dissertation is to address the scalability issue in WDM networks with the idea of waveband switching (WBS). This work includes the author's study of multiple aspects of waveband switching, including how to address dynamic and static user demand in WBS networks and how to achieve a survivable WBS network. When combined, the proposed approaches form a framework that enables an efficient waveband switching network for the near future or the mid-term. As a long-term solution for the Internet backbone, spectrum-sliced elastic optical path (SLICE) networks have recently attracted significant interest. SLICE aims to provide abundant bandwidth by managing spectrum resources as orthogonal sub-carriers, a finer granularity than the wavelengths of WDM networks. Another important component of this dissertation is the author's timely study in this new direction, in particular, how to efficiently accommodate user demand in SLICE networks. We refer to the overall study as resource management in multi-granular optical networks. In WBS networks, multi-granularity includes fiber, waveband, and wavelength. In SLICE networks, traffic granularity refers to the variety of the demand size (in terms of the number of sub-carriers).

Committee
Dr. Xiaojun Cao (chair)
Dr. Anu Bourgeois
Dr.. Guantao Chen
Dr. Yanqing Zhang