This book presents advances in the field of optical networks - specifically on research and applications in elastic optical networks (EON). The material reflects the authors’ extensive research and industrial activities and includes contributions from preeminent researchers and practitioners in optical networking. The authors discuss the new research and applications that address the issue of increased bandwidth demand due to disruptive, high bandwidth applications, e.g., video and cloud applications. The book also discusses issues with traffic not only increasing but becoming much more dynamic, both in time and direction, and posits immediate, medium, and long-term solutions throughout the text. The book is intended to provide a reference for network architecture and planning, communication systems, and control and management approaches that are expected to steer the evolution of EONs.