A Performance Overview of Quality of Service Mechanisms in Optical Burst Switching Networks -- End-to-End Proportional Differentiation Over OBS Networks -- Markovian Analysis of a Synchronous Optical Packet Switch -- A Conditional Probability Approach to Performance Analysis of Optical Unslotted Bus-Based Networks -- A Novel Early DBA Mechanism with Prediction-Based Fair Excessive Bandwidth Allocation Scheme in EPON -- Overview of MAC Protocols for EPONs -- Scheduling Transmission of Multimedia Video Traffic on WDM Passive Optical Access Networks -- MAC Protocols for Single-Hop Passive-Star Coupled WDM Optical Networks -- Efficient Traffic Grooming Scheme for WDM Network -- Current Progress in Optical Traffic Grooming: Towards Distributed Aggregation in All-Optical WDM Networks -- Guaranteed Quality of Recovery in WDM Mesh Networks -- TCP-Oriented Restoration Objectives for SONET/SDH Networks.

Optical communication networks have played and will continue to play a prominent role in the development and deployment of communication network infrastructures. New optical systems and protocols will enable next generation optical networks to meet the diverse requirements from a wide range of new applications and services. Optical networks have evolved to become more flexible, intelligent and reliable. New optical switching architectures, technologies, and sophisticated control and management protocols have already enabled optical networks to be used not only in the core but also the metropolitan and access networks. The widespread deployment of optical communication networks will continue to have a big impact on our future lifestyle. Current Research Progress of Optical Networks is aimed to provide an overview on recent research progresses in optical networking with proposed solutions, survey and tutorials on various issues and topics in optical network technologies and services. Twelve chapters contain original research work or survey and tutorials that have the potential to shape the technologies and services of next generation optical networks.