The increasing bandwidth demands in access networks motivates network operators, networking devices manufacturers, and standardization institutions to search for new approaches for access networks. These approaches should support higher bandwidth, longer distance between end user and network operator, and less energy consumption. Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) is a favorable choice for broadband access networks. EPONs support transmission rates up to 10 Gbps. EPONs also support distance between end users and central office up to 20 Km. Moreover, optical networks have the least energy consumption among all types of networks. In this dissertation, we focus on reducing delay and saving energy in EPONs. Reducing delay is essential for delay-sensitive traffic, while minimizing energy consumption is an environmental necessity and also reduces the network operating costs. We identify five challenges, namely excess bandwidth allocation, frame delineation, congestion resolution, large round trip time delay in long-reach EPONs (LR-EPONs), and energy saving. We provide a Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) approach for each challenge. We also propose a novel scheme that combines the features of the proposed approaches in one highly performing scheme. Our approach is to design novel DBA protocols that can further reduce the delay and be simultaneously simple and fair. We also present a dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme for Green EPONs taking into consideration maximizing energy saving under target delay constraints. Regarding excess bandwidth allocation, we develop an effective DBA scheme called Delayed Excess Scheduling (DES). DES achieves significant delay and jitter reduction and is more suitable for industrial deployment due to its simplicity. Utilizing DES in hybrid TDM/WDM EPONs (TWDM-EPONs) is also investigated. We also study eliminating the wasted bandwidth due to frame delineation. We develop an interactive DBA scheme, Efficient Grant Sizing Interleaved Polling (EGSIP), to compensate the unutilized bandwidth due to frame delineation. Our solution achieves delay reduction ratio up to 90% at high load. We also develop a Congestion Aware Limited Time (CALT) DBA scheme to detect and resolve temporary congestion in EPONs. CALT smartly adapts the optical networking unit (ONU) maximum transmission window according to the detected congestion level. Numerical results show that CALT is more robust at high load compared to other related published schemes. Regarding LR-EPONs, the main concern is large round trip delay mitigation. We address two problems, namely bandwidth over-granting in Multi-Thread Polling (MTP) and on-the-fly void filling. We combine, with some modifications, EGSIP and DES to resolve bandwidth over-granting in MTP. We also manage to adaptively tune MTP active running threads along with the offered load. Regarding on-the-fly void filling, Our approach, Parallel Void Thread (PVT), achieves large delay reduction for delay-sensitive traffic. PVT is designed as a plus function to DBA and can be combined with almost all DBA schemes proposed before. The powerful feature of our proposed solutions is integrability. We integrate our solutions together and form a multi-feature, robust, fairly simple, and well performing DBA scheme over LR-TWDM-EPONs. Our final contribution is about energy saving under target delay constraints. We tackle the problem of downstream based sleep time sizing and scheduling under required delay constraints. Simulation results show that our approach adheres to delay constraints and achieves almost ideal energy saving ratio at the same time.