Advances in Optical Communications Technologies

Examines new optical technologies and applications. With recent advances in emerging fields such as silicon photonic integration and spatial-division multiplexing (SDM), optical communications and networking technologies demonstrated great success in supporting the ever increasing growth of data center networks. Meanwhile, the implementation of software- defined networking (SDN) is making optical communications networks (i.e., both fiber optic systems and optical wireless ones) more agile, programmable, and application-aware to provide short time to market and flexible service solutions. Moreover, we are also happy to witness attractive progress in optical camera communications, which can leverage the built-in cameras in smartphones to realize device-to-device communication. Finally, the development of optical communications and networking technologies always needs support from innovations in fundamental physics.