New frontiers in optical communication networking

The need for achieving more flexibility, higher capacity, programmability and embedded cognition at reasonable extra cost in future optical communication networks, is one of the immediate consequences of the overwhelming developments of real-time person-to-person and machine-to-machine interactions and online services. These features are expected to be introduced in the coming years with the emergence of: • Tactile Internet as a set-horizon to be met in the 5
^th
generation of mobile networks, • Internet of Things based applications to build smart cities and brand-new style of living, • Giant data farms to store and process the ever-increasing generated data. Since this progress impacts different tiers of the Internet backbone - and by now optical-based solutions have penetrated all of them - new optical networking solutions must be introduced in every tier/network segment to keep with the pace of these new developments.