OSA (Optical Society of America) Journal of Optical Networking - Special issue: Call for Papers: Optical Networks for the Future Internet

In the past 30 years the Internet has been very successful while developing through an incremental approach. The evolution of the Internet’s popularity has led to its current central position as a fundamental enabler of the world’s economy. Several developments have allowed the Internet to adjust to this evolving role, and one of the fundamental drivers has been the wide availability of broadband connections based on optical transmission technologies. However, there are many challenges to be foreseen as driving forces to redefine the Internet. The traffic demand is increasing exponentially due to the growing number of users and offered bandwidth per user as well as the large data flows that are transferred between users. In addition, an enormous increase in on-line content offered by the Internet is expected to continue. These network scaling requirements, both in terms of number of users, their devices, and bandwidth are key facets of the future Internet that has not been fully explored anywhere and will potentially require major contributions from the photonics research community. The existing Internet was not originally designed to scale to billions of users and to the multi-Gbits/s transmission rates to the desktop that will be found in future applications supporting computational data, sensor grids, digital cinema, storage, etc. This special issue will solicit contributions discussing the most significant aspects that will position optical technologies as a fundamental contributor in defining the future Internet architecture. Some of these aspects will be scalability, programmability, parallelism, network adaptations, and network management. The scope of the papers includes, but is not limited to, the following topics: • Scalable optical network architectures for the future Internet • Optical network security, reliability, survivability, and quality of service provisioning • Optical network architectures supporting future Internet applications • User control of network infrastructure and services • New service paradigms • Internet routing architectures supporting future optical networks • Energy- and cost-efficient optical network