Due to the tremendous growth of traffic volume caused by both exponential increase of number of Internet users and continual emergence of new bandwidth demanding applications, high capacity networks are required in order to satisfactorily handle the extremely large amount of traffic. Hence, optical fiber communication is the key technology for the network infrastructure. This thesis addresses design, analysis and simulation of access and core networks targeting important research problems, which need to be tackled for the effective realization of next generation optical networks. Among different fiber access architectures, passive optical network (PON) is considered as the most promising alternative for the last mile connection due to its r...