Advances in Optical Communications Technologies

Abstract

The articles in this special section focus on recent advancements in optical communication. In 2017, as fiber optic communications technologies continue to demonstrate their advantages in telecom and data center networks, we are also witnessing attractive and promising progress on optical wireless communications, which can potentially work with RF communications to meet the ever-increasing demands for higher date transmission rates and smart home networking. Meanwhile, the innovations in optical communications and networking systems can never be realized without fundamental support from the physical infrastructure layer. The recent advances on few-mode fibers open up appealing opportunities for equipment vendors and network operators to solve the capacity crunch problem using mode-division multiplexing. To integrate the momentum gained from these technical advances, an efficient and intelligent network control and management (NC&M) mechanism is essential, especially for building heterogeneous networks to support a wide range of services with various traffic patterns. Therefore, the implementation of software-defined networking (SDN) in optical communications networks appears inevitable, and we expect to see more advances in this area in 2017.