Workshop on Hot Topics in Optical Technologies and Applications in Networking (HotOptics 2026)

Call for Papers

Optical technologies represent a vibrant community of science and engineering innovations, from Nobel-prize-winning breakthroughs (e.g., the invention of optical fibers, optical lasers, etc.) to hundreds of billion-dollar industries (e.g., in telecommunications, cloud computing, semiconductors, and silicon photonics, etc.). Today, the global Internet and digital infrastructures are built upon optical networks and systems. In particular, the area of computer communications and networking, where the SIGCOMM community is thriving, has significantly benefited from the advancement of optical technologies in the past several decades. For example, the advent of long-haul wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical fibers in the 1970s paved the way for upper-layer innovations including TCP/IP and wide-area networks. The development of integrated photonics since the 2000s has led to the mass deployment of optical transceivers in modern data center networks. The recent strategic deployment of optical circuit switching (OCS) by industry giants like Google underscores the potential and readiness for large-scale reconfigurable optical interconnects for emerging machine-learning workloads.

The SIGCOMM community is committed to advancing the technologies of computer networks and networked systems. Over the past several years, as the slowdown of Moore's law is affecting the entire electronic industry, we have witnessed an emerging trend of adopting optical hardware to sustain the ever-growing traffic demands, ranging from optical wide-area networks to optical circuit-switched data center networks. Most recently, more radical research efforts have emerged in the community to explore novel optical hardware like silicon photonic Tbps optical I/O, smart optical transceivers capable of photonic computing, and optically reconfigurable TPU to build high-performance networked systems to accelerate machine learning workloads. This line of work blends emerging optical hardware into the existing cloud networked systems at the crossroads of multiple research areas, e.g., silicon photonics, fiber optics, FPGA, programmable data plane, scheduling, synchronization, congestion control, and network optimization, which requires cross-disciplinary insights and knowledge. Despite the promising and exciting outlook, we do hear comments and feedback from members of the SIGCOMM community on many occasions about the high barrier of entry into optical networks research due to the lack of optics-related background knowledge, open-source hardware kits and software tools, etc.

This workshop aims to embrace the synergistic history between the optics community and networking community and explore the next exciting opportunities that lie at the intersection of these two areas. To facilitate a fruitful discussion on this interdisciplinary topic, we will invite leading experts from both areas to talk about state-of-the-art advances in this area. We will also call for technical submissions from the community to build a successful workshop.

Topics of Interest

Building on the success of HotOptics 2024, we are committed to evolving HotOptics alongside the most transformative developments in optical and computer networking. The explosive growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made optical technologies a foundational component of modern computing infrastructures. Hyperscale AI clusters now rely critically on optical interconnects to deliver the bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and scalability required for large-scale training and inference workloads. Emerging technologies—such as silicon photonic co-packaged optics, Tbps optical I/O, optical circuit switching for reconfigurable fabrics, space-division multiplexing and hollow-core fibers, coherent pluggable transceivers (e.g., 800G/1.6T), and photonic accelerators for analog computing—are rapidly transitioning from research prototypes to essential system building blocks. Together, these advances signal a structural shift in the design of future computing and networking infrastructures.

The networking community has begun to recognize this paradigm shift. Yet, much of the current discourse remains at an early stage. A critical gap persists in developing a deep and systematic understanding of how these optical technologies operate in practice, the constraints and opportunities they introduce, and how they can be co-designed with electronic systems to support large-scale distributed AI workloads.

This year, HotOptics places special emphasis on optical technologies that enable AI systems, while continuing to embrace broader topics at the intersection of optics and networking. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. AI Scale-Up (Inter-Chip and Intra-Rack Networks)

• Co-packaged optics (CPO) and optical I/O for AI accelerators
• Silicon photonics and chiplet-based optical interconnects
• Integrated photonics for high-density, energy-efficient interconnects
• Optical switching for rack-scale AI
• Photonic integration, packaging, and reliability
• Photonic network elements and systems (optical switches, silicon photonics devices and systems)

2. AI Scale-Out (Data Center and Cluster Networks)

• Optical fabrics for hyperscale AI clusters
• Reconfigurable data center network topologies
• Optical switching for data-center-scale AI
• Energy-efficient optical architectures for AI training and inference
• Transport-layer protocols for high-performance data centers
• AI/ML-driven intra-data-center network control and management
• Disaggregated and composable data center architectures

3. AI Scale-Across (Metro, WAN, and Geo-Distributed AI)

• Optical transport for distributed AI
• Cross-data-center model synchronization
• High-capacity coherent optics
• Hollow-core fiber for low-latency AI data center interconnection
• Resilient and low-latency optical infrastructures for AI services
• Cross-layer IP/optical inter-data-center network control and management
• Precise time synchronization for geo-distributed AI systems

4. Cross-Cutting Themes

• Advances in integrated photonics and optical components
• Photonic computing and photonic AI accelerators
• Free-space optics for data center networking
• Optical networks for quantum communication, networking, and computing
• Security, privacy, and quantum-secured optical networks
• Energy efficiency and sustainability in optical network infrastructures
• Modeling and performance analysis of optical-AI systems

Submission Instructions

We welcome submissions of two types of contributions:

Short papers:

• This type of submission presents original, unpublished research work not currently under review by other conferences or journals, and short position papers or vision papers that identify new research problems, advocate for new research methodology, or offer critiques and debate of existing work in the field. These submissions do not need to be supported by full evaluations - preliminary and proof-of-concept demonstrations are sufficient. Any of the following categories of short papers are welcome. (1) Position papers that present a future vision or critiques of optical networking research. (2) Self-sustained work with solid technical contribution and evaluation, but the scope is smaller than a 12-page full paper. (3) Early-stage work with an initial research idea and preliminary results, to be extended to a full paper later.
• The paper should not exceed 6 pages (10 point font, 12 point leading, 7 inch by 9.25 inch text block), including figures, and tables. References and appendix are allowed to go beyond the page limit. The submitted research paper will be peer-reviewed by the program committee in a double-blind way, and those accepted papers will be presented during the workshop, and published in the final workshop proceedings at ACM Digital Library.
• The goal of this type of research paper is to provide a venue for researchers to publish and receive timely feedback on their ongoing work or not-yet-mature ideas so that eventually the final 12-page full paper can land in top systems and optics venues such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, as well as journals papers like Nature and Science portfolios, Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN), Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT), Optics Express, etc.

Technical abstracts:

• This type of submission presents a summary of early-stage or ongoing work seeking community feedback. We also welcome submissions on short abstracts or highlights of previously published work.
• The submitted technical abstract should not exceed 3 pages (10 point font, 12 point leading, 7 inch by 9.25 inch text block), including figures, tables, references, and appendix. The submitted abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the program committee in a single-blind way, and those accepted abstracts will be presented during the workshop. Technical abstracts will not appear in the final workshop proceedings, and not be considered as publications.
• The goal of this type of technical abstract is to provide a venue for researchers to advertise their previously published results to reach a broader audience and seek follow-up collaborations that often involve interdisciplinary expertise.

Prospective authors are expected to submit papers written in English using the standard ACM template for conference papers (https://github.com/scyue/latex-sigcomm18). If you are using LaTeX, you may make use of this template for ACM conference proceedings. With the older versions of this template, you must add “10pt” to the documentclass command to meet the submission requirements. The current template sets 10pt by default. (Unlike the official template, it only includes examples for conference proceedings.)

Submissions must be made via HotCRP: https://hotoptics26.hotcrp.com

At least one author from each accepted submission must attend the workshop to present and discuss their work. If you have any questions, please contact workshop chairs Jesse E. Simsarian (jesse.simsarian@nokia-bell-labs.com), Massimo Tornatore (massimo.tornatore@polimi.it), Yiting Xia (yxia@mpi-inf.mpg.de), and Zhizhen Zhong (zhizhenz@mit.edu).

Important Dates

Organizers