LAUSR

The global communication revolution that has been enabled through massive data transmission within photonic networks has had a tremendous impact on people’s lifestyle and modern industry. Over the past two decades, high-speed optical links have been successfully applied to various systems ranging from long-haul transmission lines to short-haul communications within buildings. The tremendous growth in the demand for high data rates in photonic networks encourages exploiting the available resources in this medium more efficiently. Much effort has been devoted to quantifying fundamental limits of fiber-optic channels. One of the key devices to establish a high-bit-rate photonic signal processing system is a photonic switch which functions with an ultrashort delay time. The idea of using photonic networks to replace present-day electronic switching fabrics was initially driven by the power hungry nature of the optical to electronic and electronic to optical conversion. Additionally, there is a speed limitation for the electronic interconnection which typically employs millions of closely spaced metal wires in the stateof-the-art computer systems. A photonic switch that controls optical signals directly by another light beam with potential recovery times in the picoor femto-second regimes has the capability for terahertz switching speed. The availability of such a component, combined with the use of low-loss optical waveguides and fibers, would provide a promising step toward high-speed and low-cost photonic networks at short distances. Indeed, the more severe signal-dependent nonlinear effect in photonic channels, compared to wireline and wireless channels, makes the channel modeling and capacity analysis of these channels cumbersome. The recent progress in channel modeling and capacity analysis of photonic channels have opened a new horizon in the design of data transmission schemes operating with higher spectral efficiencies than current systems. The submitted manuscripts were reviewed by experts from both academia and industry. After two rounds of reviewing, the highest quality manuscripts were accepted for this special issue. This special issue will be published by Photonic Network Communications as special issues. Totally, 12 papers are suggested to EiC for acceptance from 27 manuscript submissions. The selected papers are summarized as follows: Fang [1] presents a master–slave wireless network monitoring system by integrating ZigBee and GSM technologies. The detected gas status from the remote detection unit can be transmitted to master monitoring station via self-organizing ZigBee network. Sun et al. [2] propose several pneumatic control schemes implemented with proportional and PWMsolenoid valves to achieve optimal control for pneumatic soft actuators adapted to different soft robots, such as soft gripper and soft humanoid hand. The block-sparse structure is shared by many types of signals, including audio, image, and radar-emitted signals. This structure can considerably improve compressive sensing (CS) performance and has attracted much attention in recent years. However, when fitting this model in practical applications, the nonzero blocks are always separated by one or more zero blocks to avoid interference between active emitters. (Generally, a block is occupied by an emitter.) Tian and Wang [3] coin a new phrase, ‘nonadjacent block sparse,’ or NBS, to describe this new structure. Wang and Zhao [4] study the HWSN reliability evaluation based on IoV perception layer and utilize the object-oriented colored Petri net as the modeling tool for HWSN. On the basis of this model, this paper further * Zheng Xu [email protected]