Following the tradition of previous editions of the Optical Network Design and Modeling Conference, ONDM 2016, organized in May in Cartagena, Spain, covered cutting-edge research in the areas of optical networking and systems, as well as emerging topics such as new optical network architectures for the cloud/datacenter, converged access optical networks, and SDN-NFV developments in optical networks.

In recognition of ONDM’s well-established history and the sustained quality of its technical program, this year the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN) has decided to host an ONDM special issue, composed of a selection of papers from ONDM 2016. The Editors-in-Chief of JOCN, in collaboration with the ONDM Program Chairs, have overseen the production of a high-quality article collection on an expedited schedule, without compromising the characteristic rigorous selection process of JOCN.

The papers published in this ONDM 2016 special issue were drawn from highly ranked ONDM contributed works. This collection of top-quality optical networking papers has been screened twice for relevance, innovation, and quality—once through the ONDM selection process and once through the JOCN review process.

Five of the papers provide important and novel insights in the field of the dynamic operation of elastic optical networks, a topic that keeps drawing a lot of attention in our research community, by investigating adaptive routing, advance reservation, and WSS-based routing in elastic optical networks; the control of elastic transponders with NETConf and YANG; and how to utilize the knowledge of connection duration for efficient spectrum defragmentation.

Confirming a clear trend in optical networking research, next-generation optical access systems are also represented in three other papers related to metro-access convergence, optical-network-based cloud RAN architectures, and dynamic bandwidth and wavelength allocation in NG-PON. Other important results covered in this special issue include the rising fields of SDM networking and virtual machine migration over optical substrates, as well as multi-layer resiliency with latency constraints.

We hope you enjoy this special issue.

Ori Gerstel and Pat Iannone

JOCN Editors-in-Chief

Massimo Tornatore, Nina Skorin-Kapov, and Pablo Pavon Mariño

Guest Editors, ONDM 2016 JOCN Special Issue