Series Editorial: Optical Communications and Networks

Journal article, 2025

Optical communications and networks continue to play a crucial role in cost-effectively interconnecting a large variety of resources over highly-distributed network segments, for massive data exchange and processing. Nowadays, with momentum gained from artificial intelligence (AI), large-language models (LLMs), and 6G, optical communication networks are becoming more flexible, programmable and application-aware. Following this trend, we expect to witness continued expansion of optical networks and optical data-center interconnects as well as accelerated convergence of optical circuit switching and electrical packet switching.