Recent growth in broadband demand is driven by video streaming, social networking, and online gaming. This is putting pressure on network capacity and requiring network upgrades to support exponentially growing traffic. Optical access networks are adopting technologies like GPON, EPON, and 10GEPON to provide higher bandwidth to homes and businesses. In core transport networks, technologies like 100GbE, ROADMs, photonic integrated circuits, and Ethernet over WDM are enabling capacity to scale to terabits while reducing costs. Open research challenges include cross-layer optimization, network planning, and scheduling for grid computing applications over optical burst switching networks.

1. Recent Growth in Broadband Demand and Advances in Optical Network Technologies (Invited Paper) Dr. Soumya Roy Infinera [email_address]