IEEE has recently finished its ratification of the IEEE Standard 802.3ba in June 2010 which set the target Ethernet speed as 100 Gbps. The studies on the future trends of the ever-increasing demands for higher speed optical fiber communications show that there is no sign of decline in the demand. Constantly increasing internet traffic and the bandwidth-hungry multimedia services like HDTV, YouTube, voice-over-IP, etc. can be shown as the main driving forces. Indeed, the discussions over the future upgrades on the Ethernet speeds have already been initiated. It is predicted that the next upgrade will enable 400 Gbps Ethernet and the one after will be toward enabling the astounding 1 Tbps Ethernet.Although such high and ultra high transmission speeds are unprecedented over any transmission medium, the bottlenecks for achieving them over the optical fiber remains to be fundamental. At such high operating symbol rates, the signal impairments due to inter- and intra-channel fiber nonlinearities and polarization mode dispersion get exacerbated to the levels that cripple the high-fidelity communication over optical fibers. Therefore, efforts should be exerted to provide solutions that not only answer the need for high-speed transmission but also maintain low operating symbol rates.In this dissertation, we contribute to these efforts by proposing nonbinary-LDPC-coded modulation (NB-LDPC-CM) schemes as enabling technologies that can meet both the aforementioned goals. We show that our proposed NB-LDPC-CM schemes can outperform their prior-art, binary counterparts called bit-interleaved coded modulation (BI-LDPC-CM) schemes while attaining the same aggregate bit rates at a lower complexity and latency. We provide comprehensive analysis on the computational complexity of both schemes to justify our claims with solid evidence. We also compare the performances of both schemes by using amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise dominated optical fiber transmission and short to medium haul optical fiber transmission scenarios. Both applications show outstanding performances of NB-LDPC-CM schemes over the prior-art BI-LDPC-CM schemes with increasing gaps in coding gain as the transmission speeds increase. Furthermore, we present how a rate-adaptive NB-LDPC-CM can be employed to fully utilize the resources of a long haul optical transport network throughout its service time.

Innovations in optical communication are expected to transform the landscape of global communications, internet and datacenter networks. This dissertation investigates several important issues in optical communication such as fairness, throughput, blocking probability and differentiated quality of service (QoS). Novel algorithms and new approaches have been presented to improve the performance of optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical burst switching (OBS) for long haul, and datacenter networks. Extensive simulations tests have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. These simulation tests were performed over a number of network topologies such as ring, mesh and U.S. Long-Haul, some high processing computing (HPC) topologies such as 2D and 6D mesh torus topologies and modern datacenter topologies such as FatTree and BCube. Two new schemes are proposed for long haul networks to improve throughput and hop count fairness in OBS networks. The idea is motivated by the observation that providing a slightly more priority to longer bursts over short bursts can significantly improve the throughput of the OBS networks without adversely affecting hop-count fairness. The results of extensive performance tests have shown that proposed schemes improve the throughput of optical OBS networks and enhance the hop-count fairness. Another contribution of this dissertation is the research work on developing routing and wavelength assignment schemes in multimode fiber networks. Two additional schemes for long haul networks are presented and evaluated over multimode fiber networks. First for alleviating the fairness problem in OBS networks using wavelength-division multiplexing as well as mode-division multiplexing while the second scheme for achieving higher throughput without sacrificing hop count fairness. We have also shown the significant benefits of using both mode division multiplexing and wavelength division multiplexing in real-life short-distance optical networks such as the optical circuit switching networks used in the hybrid electronic-optical switching architectures for datacenters. We evaluated four mode and wavelength assignment heuristics and compared their throughput performance. We also included preliminary results of impact of the cascaded mode conversion constraint on network throughput. Datacenter and high performance computing networks share a number of common performance goals. Another highly efficient adaptive mode wavelength- routing algorithm is presented over OBS networks to improve throughput of these networks. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been validated by extensive simulation results. In order to optimize bandwidth and maximize throughput of datacenters, an extension of TCP called multipath-TCP (MPTCP) has been evaluated over an OBS network using dense interconnect datacenter topologies. We have proposed a service differentiation scheme using MPTCP over OBS for datacenter traffic. The scheme is evaluated over mixed workload traffic model of datacenters and is shown to provide tangible service differentiation between flows of different priority levels. An adaptive QoS differentiation architecture is proposed for software defined optical datacenter networks using MPTCP over OBS. This scheme prioritizes flows based on current network state.