Next Generation Optical Communication Ecosystems

Dear Colleagues,

Optical communication systems have been widely deployed all around the world, over either fiber-optic links or free-space optical links. Classical optical communications have been growing exponentially for decades. Enormous advanced techniques have been developed to enable high-speed, long-haul, and agile optical transports, e.g., multi-dimensional multiplexing, coded modulation, coherent detection, forward error correction (FEC) coding, adaptive coding, et al. The optical communications ecosystem is certainly keeping evolving and promising to change the way things have been done before. In the state-of-the-art optical communication systems, complexity, security and capacity are the most important considerations. As the rapid development of quantum computing, traditional computational complexity based encryption faces unprecedented challenges. Quantum key distribution and  covert communications have been proposed to provide the unconditional security, and now are attracting increasing attentions. In the future, an advanced optical communication system is expected to be diverse in capacity, coding, modulation, transmission links, detection schemes, and security, which can be named as the ecosystem diversity of optical communications.

This Special Issue aims to explore the enabling technologies of the next genration optical communication ecosystems.  It will focus on the state-of-the-art advances and future perspectives of the commerical deploying systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

 (1) Coherent optical communication employing advanced modulation format;

 (2) Direct detection based long-reach optical communication systems;

 (3) Agile reconfigurable data center networks;

 (4) Free-space optical communication systems;

 (5) Quantam-secure covert communications;

 (6) Quantam key ditributions…

Guest Editor

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• Coherent communications;
• Fiber-optics communication;
• Fiber-optics link and subsystem;
• Free-space optical communications;
• Covert communications;
• Data center networks;
• Quantuam key distributions;
• Coded modulation;
• Constellation shaping;
• Quadrature amplitude modulation;
• Pulse amplitude modulation;
• Spatial division multiplexing;
• Direct detection;
• Forward error correction;
• Software defined network…