SOCN 2022 : Special Issue: Secure and Reliable Autonomous Optical Communications and Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Optical fiber networks are one of the major drivers of societal progress and a key enabler of the global telecommunication infrastructure. Optical networks have undergone considerable changes over the past decade due to continuous growth (exceeding 20% per year) of bandwidth demand. The current increase sets strong requirements in terms of capacity, reliability and costs to operators, who seek to decrease the cost per transmitted bit. Several solutions have been proposed, including wide-band which is more favourable to network operators compared to more/or novel fibers. However, wide-band optical systems present new major challenges: optical components must guarantee similar performance over a broad spectrum, and network optimization is carried out on a nonflat spectrum and with a much larger number of channels, making design, optimization and control a complex problem. Therefore, application of machine learning (ML) techniques is of increased importance in high-capacity optical systems, and they are becoming the technique of choice to solve complex nonlinear technical problems, such as advanced component design and management of wide-band networks.

Another important topic is security, since secure communications have become a requirement for virtually all kind of applications. Specifically, the security level enabled by Quantum communciations allows eavesdropping detection and guarantees the security of the key. However, the main drawback of current QKD solutions is its high cost, which limits their real applicability.

The topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

Cost-effective high-capacity technologies, including multi-band (MB);
Novel optical transmission and switching schemes and architectures;
Pervasive telemetry;
ML in Optical Communications and Networks;
Energy consumption minimization;
Highly reliable optical communications;
Optical networks programmability;
Optical wide and metro -area network management;
Optical communications at the network edge supporting 5G/6G,
Security aspects of optical communications, including Quantum Key Disytribution (QKD).

Prof. Dr. Luis Velasco
Guest Editor