Scope

The scope of the Journal includes advances in the state-of-the-art of optical networking science, technology, and engineering. Both theoretical contributions (including new techniques, concepts, analyses, and economic studies) and practical contributions (including optical networking experiments, prototypes, and new applications) are encouraged. Subareas of interest include the architecture and design of optical networks, optical network survivability and security, software-defined optical networking, elastic optical networks, data and control plane advances, network management related innovation, and optical access networks. Enabling technologies and their applications are suitable topics only if the results are shown to directly impact optical networking beyond simple point-to-point networks.

Specific topics of interest include the following:

    Architecture and design of optical networks
    Flexgrid, elastic networks, multi-band and multi-fiber networks
    Multi-layer or multi-domain networks including higher layers such as IP and transport protocols, or including applications such as 5G/6G
    Network control & management related innovation including software-defined optical networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), monitoring and analytics, intent-based networks.
    Network sensing technology and architectures
    Optical access networks including passive optical networks (PON), free-space, optical wireless communication
    Short-range optical networks within buildings, including offices, factories and homes
    Short-reach optical networks on and between servers, boards or chips.
    Space optical networks including inter-satellite and satellite-ground
    Quantum optical networks and associated technology
    Optical network survivability and security
    Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in optical networks
    Data center networks for Cloud and Edge Computing
    Network convergence, including access, metro, 5G/6G mobile and distributed edge computing
    Optical networks applied to distributed computing architectures, including for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI clusters
    Disaggregated networks including optical technologies
    Neuromorphic and photonic reservoir computing using optical networks

Special Issue on Benchmarking in Optical Networks - Part 2
Día de Entrega: 2026-01-02

After many years of observing less than sound practices in the manner research is conducted and reported in the field of network resource allocation – issues that once hampered progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence - we aimed to improve benchmarking practices in the optical networking community.  AI overcame these challenges by embracing open data/source code, large-scale scenario evaluation and proper selection of baseline solutions to compare against. In contrast, the field continues to face challenges with reproducibility due to limited disclosure of the data/source code used to obtain the results, uncertainty on the generalization of solutions due to the use of a very reduced set of instances to evaluate proposals, and the selection of inappropriate baselines. If we want research in optical network resource allocation to thrive and impact the development of next generation networks, we must embrace good benchmarking practices.

Adopting sound benchmarking practices requires, at a minimum, that authors disclose their data/source code, evaluate their results in a wide range of scenarios, and compare their proposal against state-of-the art solutions. While sharing data and code is easy to achieve, broad scenario evaluation depends on access to a curated repository of a variety of topologies. This limitation made it difficult to identify state-of-the-art solutions across a range of conditions. Given this dependency, we divided the JOCN Special Issue into two parts. 

The papers published in the first Special Issue address several topics researchers might encounter while incorporating good practices into their work. Specifically:

    An open repository of 105 real-world core topologies and thousands synthetically generated ones was reported in [1].
    A collection of access, metro and core of topologies inspired by the real-world topologies used by Telefonica is provided in [2].
    An extensive experimental dataset containing optical transmission data was reported in [3].
    An open source toolkit for simulating resource allocation scenarios in optical networks was described in [4].
    A framework for facilitating the benchmarking of new resource allocation algorithms was proposed in [5].

In this second JOCN Special Issue, we seek papers that help the research community to further embrace good benchmarking practices by reporting on:

– Open data sets and models. A non-exhaustive list of examples in this category includes: real-world or real-world inspired traffic matrices and access/metro topologies, data traces/real-world traffic models for dynamic/reconfigurable networks such as those connecting intra/inter datacenters.

– Open source code. A non-exhaustive list of examples in this category includes:  unpublished software (e.g. simulators, network design planning tools), comparative evaluation of published software or the application of published software to demonstrate good benchmarking practices

– Identification of state-of the art solutions. Evidence-based ranking of a wide range of solutions for a specific resource allocation problem. A non-exhaustive list of resource allocation problems includes:  Routing and Wavelength Allocation problem in wavelength-routed networks (RWA), elastic optical networks (RMSA), multiband optical networks (RBWA, RBMSA), multi core optical networks (RCWA, RCMSA) and launch power optimization.

We invite researchers to submit papers addressing the points listed above. If your work contributes to improving benchmarking practices in optical networking but does not directly align with the listed topics, please feel free to contact the Editors. We welcome relevant contributions, including those we may have overlooked!

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the usual standards for the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking and uploaded through the electronic submission system,specifying from the Feature Issue drop-down menu that the manuscript is for the issue on Benchmarking in Optical Networks – part 2.