Joint Special Section on Opto-electronics and Communications toward NGN and beyond

This special section is associated with the 12th Optoelectronics and Communications Conference (OECC2007) and the 16th International Conference on Integrated Optics and Optical Fiber Communication (IOOC2007) which was held in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan on July 9–13, 2007 cosponsored by IEICE Communications Society and IEICE Electronics Society. The Conference program included 260 contributed papers on research, development, and applications of optical communication systems and optoelectronic devices. The purpose of this special section is to chronicle current progress in these fields on the basis of presentations at the conference. However, this special section is not intended to be a conference digest. Advances in the researches after the conference are included in most of the papers.