The Metro Ethernet network (MEN) expands the advantages of Ethernet to cover areas wider than LAN. MENs running Ethernet Services as specified by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) are known as Carrier Ethernet Networks (CENs). CENs can cover not only metro areas, but it can expand to cover global areas by connecting multiple MENs. Next-generation CENs are expected to support 100 GbE. With arising technologies for Ultra Long-haul (ULH) networks the bandwidth bottleneck of CENs is shifting to other areas like the transport layer protocol (such as the Transport Control Protocol or TCP) and the chip-to-chip channel capacity found at the network edge, which in general has an electrical backplane. Traditional TCP is well known to have difficulties reaching the full available bandwidth, due to its inefficient AIMD mechanisms under a high-delay-bandwidth-product environment. At the network edge, network equipment with electrical backplanes poses many problems including inductive-capacitive effects that limit its bandwidth. These are the two main issues addressed in this work. To resolve the transport layer issue, this work proposes a transport protocol that fully utilizes the available bandwidth while preserving TCP-friendliness and providing QoS support that is compatible with Ethernet Services. It can guarantee throughputs above the Committed Information Rate (CIR), which is specified in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). To resolve the physical layer limitations, a novel optical coupling technique is examined to encourage the use of optical backplanes for network-edge and core technology. The proposed technique consists of aligning the normal of the laser emission plane, waveguide plane and the normal of the photodetector active region plane with the purpose of reducing optical power loss caused by common methods of light manipulation. By addressing the shortcomings of both Traditional TCP and electrical backplane technology the overall throughput can be significantly increased.

The objective of this dissertation is to improve the service quality of broadband optical access networks by developing advanced link- and transport- layer protocols. Current access technologies represent a significant bottleneck in bandwidth and service quality between a high-speed residential/enterprise network and a largely overbuilt core network. Although it is believed that passive optical network (PON) will be the most promising solution to provide truly broadband connections to end users, a suit of protocols are required to provide quality of service (QoS). In this dissertation, we design a new reservation MAC scheme that arbitrates upstream transmission, prevents collisions, and varies bandwidth according to demand and priority. The new access scheme exploits both WDM and TDM to cater for both light and heavy bandwidth requirements. Next, we introduce delta compression as an efficient method for fast content download. In the third part of this dissertation, we enhance the transport performance of Ethernet services by addressing the throughput optimization issue at the edge of the network. A novel SLA-aware transport control scheme is proposed to utilize reserved bandwidth more efficiently using a shifted additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm, and to detect congestion more accurately based on hypothesis test. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with traditional TCP through theoretical analyses and simulations.