Introduction to the feature issue on the IEEE Globecom 2017 ONS symposium

This feature issue is based on extended and revised versions of the top-ranked papers presented at the Optical Networks and Systems (ONS) Symposium that took place during the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2017). The papers appearing in this Feature Issue cover a wide range of topics, including elastic optical networks, mobile fronthaul, network function virtualization, survivability, and hybrid datacenter networks.