IEEE Communications Magazine covers all areas of communications such as lightwave telecommunications, high-speed data communications, personal communications systems (PCS), ISDN, and more. It includes special feature technical articles and monthly departments: book reviews, conferences, short courses, standards, governmental regulations and legislation, new products, and Society news such as administration and elections.

Special Issue on Next Generation Optical Interconnects for Data Centers
Submission Date: 2021-07-15

Data centers have become important part of today’s information infrastructure, which generate large network traffic and provide storage and computing power for virtually all internet and cloud services. Optical interconnect technologies are widely used today in data centers, providing machine-to-machine communications among servers, switches, routers and data centers. With switching chip capacity doubling every two years and network traffic doubling every one to two years for hyper-scale data centers, next generation scalable optical interconnect technologies will have to fulfill rapidly growing traffic demands. Over the past ten years, optical interconnects have supported 10 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s data rates. Up to 400 Gb/s interconnects are in mass deployment today in hyper-scale data centers, including intra- and inter-data center interconnects. With ever-growing traffic demands and new emerging applications such as artificial intelligence and disaggregation of computing and storage, more than 400-Gb/s will be needed for data centers in a couple of years.

With performance, power consumption and bandwidth approaching their limits, next generation data-center optical interconnects will have to involve different architectures, form factors, modulation, and detection techniques in order to reduce cost, power consumption and footprint; and to increase efficiency and scalability.

This Feature Topic (FT) will cover recent advances in the research, development, applications, of next generation — beyond 400-Gb/s- optical interconnects for data centers. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

- Architectures for intra- and inter-data center optical interconnects
- Optical interconnect architectures for new and emerging applications
- Optical interconnects for intra-data centers
- Optical interconnects for data center campuses
- Optical interconnects for data center metro networks
- Pluggable optics for inter-data center interconnects
- 800-Gb/s and beyond ZR (80-km reach) and ZR+ technologies
- Direct and coherent detection technologies for optical interconnects
- New modulation, detection and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies
- Co-packaging and on-board optics
- Optical switching in data center networks

Special Issue on Wireless Energy Transfer in Future Networks
Submission Date: 2021-08-15

With 5G starting to be commercially deployed, research in 6G mobile networks has started. One of the major key performance indicators for 6G is its extremely massive connectivity for small devices to enable the so-called Internet of Everything (IoE). Most of these IoE devices will be either battery-powered or battery-less. How to prolong the lifetime of these IoE devices becomes a key challenge. This calls for effort into two complementary areas: 1) energy efficiency to reduce IoE device’s energy consumption and 2) wireless energy transfer (WET) to open up new avenues to provide energy to IoE devices. The former area has been intensively researched under the banner of green communications. It is envisioned that 6G will utilize this research and provide WET to massive IoE devices. Emerging 6G technologies such as THz and intelligent reflective surface (IRS) provide great potential to fulfil this vision of WET. For instance, higher THz frequencies will provide better directionality which is more efficient for WET. Intelligent surfaces may be used actively or passively (using backscattering technique) to transmit or relay signals to IoE devices, enabling battery-less devices. IRS may also be manipulated to enable on-demand WET.

This Feature Topic (FT) solicits papers focusing on wireless energy transfer for IoE devices, in terms of both the infrastructure aspect and the device aspect. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
- Network architecture to support wireless energy transfer (WET) of IoE devices in future wireless networks
- Protocol and resource allocation algorithms to support WET
- Energy efficient THz-based transceiver design for joint information and energy transfer
- Visible light based transceiver design for joint information and energy transfer
- Battery-less massive access
- Prototype and experimental work for IoE device WET