It is again our pleasure to introduce this year’s OFC special issue, composed of the outstanding networking papers from OFC 2017. In collaboration with the OFC Program Chairs, we have overseen the production of a high-quality collection of optical networking papers. Our editors and reviewers worked hard to accelerate the time to publication without compromising JOCN’s rigorous review process.

The papers published in this OFC 2017 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

The papers have been screened twice for relevance, innovation, and quality—once through the OFC selection process and once through the JOCN review process.

For the second year in a row, the most common author-chosen keywords were elastic optical networking, software-defined networking, and virtualization. Other well-represented topics include restoration, energy efficiency, passive optical networks (PONs) for backhauling and fronthauling, spatial-division multiplexing, data-center networking, and undersea networking. Among the hot new topics are machine learning, open systems, cross-layer optimization, and dynamic slicing of software-defined optical networks.

We hope you enjoy this special issue.