With the rapid growth of bandwidth demand from network users and the advances in optical technologies, optical networks with multiterabits­ per-second capacity has received significant interest from both researchers and practitioners. Optical networks deployment raises a number of challenging problems that require innovative solutions, including net­ work architectures, scalable and fast network management, resource­ efficient routing and wavelength assignment algorithms, QoS support and scheduling algorithms, and switch and router architectures. In this book, we put together some important developments in this exiting area during last several years. Some of the articles are research papers and some are surveys. All articles were reviewed by two reviewers. The