Featured by the advantages of high capacity, long transmission distance, and low energy consumption, optical network has been deployed widely as the most important infrastructure for backbone transport network. With the development of Internet, datacenter has become the popular infrastructure for cloud computing, which needs to be connected with high bitrate transport network to support heterogeneous applications. In this case, optical network also becomes a promising option for intra and inter‐datacenter networking. In the networking field, software‐defined networking (SDN) has gained a lot of attention from both academic and industry, and it aims to provide a flexible and programmable control plane. SDN is applicable to optical network, and the optical network integrated with SDN, namely software‐defined optical network (SDON), are expected as the future transport solutions, which can provide both high bitrate connectivity and flexible network applications. The principles and applications of SDON are introduced in this chapter.
Part of the book: Optical Fiber and Wireless Communications
As quantum computers with sufficient computational power are becoming mature, the security of classical communication and cryptography may compromise, which is based on the mathematical complexity. Quantum communication technology is a promising solution to secure communication based on quantum mechanics. To meet the secure communication requirements of multiple users, multipoint-interconnected quantum communication networks are specified, including quantum key distribution networks and quantum teleportation networks. The enabling technologies for quantum communication are the important bases for multipoint-interconnected quantum communication networks. To achieve the better connection, resource utilization, and resilience of multipoint-interconnected quantum communication networks, the efficient network architecture and optimization methods are summarized, and open issues in quantum communication networks are discussed.
Part of the book: Quantum Computing and Communications