This document presents an optical network architecture that considers passive access segments and optical burst switching. The architecture seeks the provisioning of very high speed end-to-end optical communications with great flexibility and efficient resource utilization while taking advantage of an installed infrastructure. We discuss the operation principles of a signaling protocol suitable for the control plane of the proposed architecture. We also present a simulation model and use it in a performance study. Our results show that the shared nature of the access segments has a major effect on utilization and loss performance, highlighting the need for improved resource allocation methods.