The bandwidth-intensive applications, such as interactive video and multimedia services, have further increased the demand of bandwidth. Thus wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) is viewed as a promising candidate to realize the next generation optical access networks due to its dedicated bandwidth for each subscriber and more flexible bandwidth management. The first half of this thesis will cover three technologies in a WDM-PON, including multicast overlay scheme, automatic protection switching scheme and tunable Fabry-Pérot laser diode (FP-LD) self-seeding scheme. In the second half of the thesis, WDM optical network is utilized as a virtual computing environment, which connects widely distributed computing resources to support large-scale scientific, engineering or commercial computing applications. It is so called “optical Grid” systems. Grid applications may range from the simple transfer of a large data set to the complex execution of a collection of interdependent tasks. However, for such a system involving many heterogeneous computing and network resources, faults seem to be inevitable. This thesis will also address the issue of maximizing grid application availability in real-time optical Grid systems through resource-fault-tolerant scheduling techniques.
