In this thesis, optical burst switched (OBS) wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) ring architecture is proposed for supporting metropolitan area networks (MAN). The proposed OBS ring architecture consists of N OBS nodes connected by optical fibers, and N data burst wavelengths and one separate control wavelength. For data burst wavelengths, tunable transmitter and fixed receiver (TT-FR) are used while a fixed transceiver for a control wavelength is chosen in each node of the proposed OBS ring. Each node has its dedicated receiving wavelength. In order to improve end-to-end delay and queueing size, a multi-token protocol for OBS ring network, called modified round-robin manner / token (M-RR/Token), is also proposed in this thesis.
Moreover, for expanding OBS networks to access networks, this thesis proposes multiple rings architecture and ring+PON architecture.
The performance analysis using OPNET network simulator shows that the proposed architecture can flexibly accommodate a large number of access networks and M-RR/Token reduces about 3ms in end-to-end delay and about $2.3\times10^5$ bits in queueing size, compared with RR/Token at average arrival rate 2 Gbps.