This work presents a scalable and high performance prediction protocol for optical networks. In the proposed protocol, we develop a mathematical model to maintain the stability of a network system by prediction based on the traffic temporal locality property. All the critical factors, including transceiver tuning time, propagation delay, and processing time for dealing with control packets, are considered in the proposed prediction protocol. Furthermore, our protocol can resolve the bottlenecks attributed to control signaling and electronics processing. The performance evaluation reveals that the proposed scheme can yield the higher bandwidth efficiency and incur a lower packet delay than those of the TDM and conventional reservation schemes. Also, the proposed protocol can flexibly support any scaled network system such as MANs or LANs.