Forward of special issue on Optical Network Architectures, Systems and Applications

The traffic demands keep increasing rapidly due to the growing number of broadband users and the existing and upcoming applications available to the end users. In addition, the enormous increase in on-line content and video traffic offered by the Internet is expected to continue. As optical technology can inherently support very high capacities, it is clear that it will continue to expand and play a central role in the future telecommunication networks. This special issue addressesmajor advances in optical networking in the area of network architectures, switching and routing, and IP/WDM integration. With rapid advances in optical enabling devices and systems, multi-terabit transport networks have become a reality. In particular, in long-haul networks advanced dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) technology is currently widely introduced. Transmission technologies based on DWDM systems allow transmitting information with speed of Tb/s on a single fiber. To facilitate this enormous transmission volume the deployment of highcapacity andhigh-speednetworknodes in the optical network becomes inevitable.