The last decade has witnessed an explosive growth in internet protocol, packet based traffic. Although long-haul fiber backbone networks provide capacities on the order of Tb/s, a bottleneck at the access network has arisen due to electronic domain signal processing. Recent developments in optical multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) access networks promise to remove this bottleneck and allow Gb/s capacities per user and satisfy foreseeable future bandwidth requirements. This thesis introduces an optical MPLS network where packet payloads are wavelength multiplexed and labels correspond to spectral optical code division multiple access codes. Using this network, we examine payload and label processing issues in nodes as packets transit through the core network. We develop a software package to model data traffic flow in a node, where reduced sets of realistic wavelength converters are used to mitigate payload wavelength contentions. Furthermore, we successfully demonstrate an all-photonic label switching system to convert (7,4) spectral m-sequence labels using commercially available optical components.

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