New Trends in Optical Networks

A photonics-enhanced information and communication infrastructure will be the key enabler that the future digital society, industry, and economy will rely upon, shared by humans and machines. This infrastructure will be connected to a myriad of connected devices. It will require unprecedented capacity, energy, and cost efficiency and ultrafast responsivity for time-sensitive applications for humans and robots.
This reprint covers recent advances and new trends in the research and standardization of optical networks with high impacts on the future digitized society and economy, encompassing all network layers from new optical components to smart network operations. Covered topics include new materials, technologies, and production processes for optical communications devices; high-speed optical transport networks, beyond terabit/s; optical wireless communications; new switching paradigms for flexible capacity scaling, low latency, and time-deterministic networking; virtualized highly flexible network control; integrated fixed-mobile architectures; and convergence of mobile, optical, and cloud computing.