It is our pleasure to introduce this year’s OFC special issue, composed of the outstanding networking papers from OFC 2016. In collaboration with the OFC Program Chairs, we have overseen the production of a high quality article collection on an expedited schedule. Our editors and reviewers worked hard to accelerate the time to publication without compromising the rigorous selection process typical of JOCN.

The papers published in this OFC 2016 special issue were drawn from OFC invited papers and highly ranked OFC contributed papers. The OFC subcommittees represented in this year’s special issue are

This collection of top-quality optical networking papers has been screened twice for relevance, innovation and quality—once through the OFC selection process and once through the JOCN selection process.

Based on the keywords chosen by the authors to describe their work, software defined networking, elastic optical networks, and virtualization are the most common themes. Other noteworthy topics include flexgrid and spectrum defragmentation, resilience, flexible modulation, network optimization, optical switching, optical networks based on spatial-division multiplexing, free space optical networks, and optical access networks for backhauling and fronthauling applications.

We hope you enjoy this special issue.