As in past years, we are glad to provide our readers a special issue of the best networking papers from OFC 2014. The editors-in-chief of JOCN, as well as the OFC program chairs, invited the best contributed systems/networking papers of the conference to submit to this invitation-only special issue. The intent was to provide a high-quality article collection on an expedited schedule, but without compromising the rigorous selection process using our excellent editors and reviewers, who worked hard to reduce the review time. As a result of this process, some of the invited papers were rejected.

This OFC 2014 special issue is extensive and includes 59 papers, of which 14 were OFC invited papers and the rest were highly ranked OFC contributed papers. The number of papers in the special issue is almost double the number of papers published in last year’s special issue—and therefore provides a good one-stop-shop for top-quality optical networking papers that have been screened twice for relevance, innovation, and quality—once through the OFC selection process and once though the JOCN selection process.

As in the last few years, this year’s selections include many papers on elastic optical networks—including flexible use of spectrum and programmable transceivers. However, this year many of these papers consider the use of software defined networking (SDN) technology as a way to improve the use of resources and the coordination among nodes in an elastic network. More broadly, SDN is clearly one of the key topics of this year’s crop, and it is interesting to see that quite a few of these papers include experimentation with SDN—reflecting a transition in the state of this technology from theory toward commercialization. In addition, quite a few papers are related to passive optical networks (PONs), reflecting a steady interest in technologies that allow dramatic increases in user capacity. These PON papers describe a range of research results, from near-term work focused on optimizing and improving the time and wavelength-division PON technology, slated to be the next ITU-T standard, to more futuristic PON architectures relying on advanced digital signal processing and/or coherent detection.

We hope you enjoy this special issue.

Ori Gerstel and Pat Iannone

JOCN Editors-in-Chief