Welcome Remarks

This year's iPOP International Conference marks its 11th anniversary.
This annual event which has been sponsored by Photonic Internet Labs (PIL) and ISOCORE since its inception, will take place at the Okinawa Jichikaikan, Okinawa, Japan, April 20-22, 2015. This is an exception to previous years which were held in Tokyo area. While the topics of the conference are moving from photonic networks or GMPLS to NFV or SDN, the key focus is still on reliable, manageable, flexible and cost effective carrier and/or service provider networks.
Okinawa is becoming the center for SDN and OpenFlow research in Japan and iPOP this year is hosted by the Okinawa Open Lab.

The iPOP 2015 Conference addresses important topics and issues related to SDN (software defined network). The main target here is the SDN for Carrier networks. This is very much different from the data center networks, as high reliability, monitoring capability for their operation will be required. To this end, we will have a demonstration with multiple research and interoperability sites including Okinawa Open Lab and ISOCORE. This is the world first demonstration for multi-carrier SDN networking globally. This technology has the potential to be deployed in inter-datacenter network and also future contents centric and/or IoT/M2M network. There will be interesting discussion on the future capability of SDN and NFV. The technical program committee has put together an exciting program consisting of technical sessions with emphasis on presentations on ASON (Automatically Switched Optical Network), WSON (Wavelength Switched Optical Network), PCE (Path Computation Element) and its applications, and Packet Transport over Optical. Finally do not miss Okinawa Open Lab's tour which is world class research labs demonstrated with ISOCORE USA during this event.

In addition to the main presentation and discussion topics above, this year, we expect to discuss multi-area networks and multi-technology operation incorporating optical paths in the showcase and booth demonstrations. There will be technical demonstrations and showcases combined with the presentations.

We hope that you would be able to attend iPOP 2015 and make this event a great success! We look forward to your participation and support.

March 2015
iPOP2015 General Co-Chairs
Naoaki Yamanaka
Bijan Jabbari