Guest Editorial

Optical Switching and Networking: Special Issue of ONDM 2010

The 14th International Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM 2010) was held from January 31st to February 3rd, 2010 in Kyoto Institute of Technology, in Kyoto, Japan. ONDM 2010 was co-sponsored by International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee 6 (TC6), Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) and Kyoto Institute of Technology, and was technically co-sponsored by IPSJ SIG-IOT, IEICE Communications Society, IEICE Technical Committee on Photonic Network, IEEE Communications Society and Photonic Internet Forum. About 100 researchers attended mainly from Italy, USA, France, UK, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Australia, Canada, Germany and Japan. ONDM 2010 held in other than Europe for the first time was the fruit of the successful bidding activity for a long term.

ONDM is relatively of small-scale but unique annual international conference focusing on cutting-edge and state-of-the-art research in optical networking and newly emerging areas. ONDM 2010 consisted of 2 workshops, 2 keynote speeches and 8 serial technical sessions including a poster session. The exhibition program which 10 companies participated in was also held simultaneously.

Two workshops were held in the afternoon of the first day. The first one was entitled “NGN current situation, capabilities and expectations,” and 6 speakers discussed on the NGN from various viewpoints. The second one was entitled “FTTH today and tomorrow,” and 5 speakers introduced the progress of FTTH deployment in their countries. The technical program consisted of 10 invited papers, 23 oral papers and 12 poster papers involving 16 papers presented from Japan. The scopes in the technical sessions were “Optical network performance and monitoring,” “Energy efficiency in optical networks,” “Optical network control and management,” “Optical network planning and migration,” “Optical access networks designs and protocols,” “OPS and OBS network design” and “Optical grids and parallel networking.”

To sum up, ONDM 2010 was very successful and fruitful for encouraging the research activity in the field of optical network design and modeling. The next ONDM will be held in Bologna, Italy.

In this special issue, we received a total of 8 submitted papers. Following two rounds of a scrutinizing review process, 4 papers were accepted to appear in the third 2012 issue of Optical Switching and Networking. The accepted manuscripts are top-quality and represent a nice coverage of the topics that the special issue intended to cover. The first paper of the special issue is authored by Ankitkumar N. Patel et al. and addresses the problem of traffic grooming and regenerator placement in a WDM optical network in which lightpaths are hop-constrained by physical impairments. The second contribution is authored by Ronald Skoog et al. and describes a highly dynamic optical network architecture that employs a 3-way hand shake signalling protocol. The third contribution by Yusuke Hirota et al. present a proposal to improve the performance of all optical buffering by combining feed forward with feedback fiber delay lines, supported by a suitable scheduling, to realize a combination of look-ahead and loop-back buffer. In the fourth and final contribution Hidetoshi Takeshita et al. propose an energy-efficient network design algorithm based on traffic grooming to minimize power consumption and present a prototype switch and a test-bed to prove the effectiveness of the scheme. We are grateful to the authors, peer reviewers, and the journal’s editorial board and staff for their contributions to this Special Issue. We hope that this special issue will be useful for the research community.