This issue of the Annals of Operations Research is devoted to recent advances in queueing theory and network applications. This special issue was open to all researchers in the field and in particular, we encouraged the authors of the papers presented in “The 11th International Conference on Queueing Theory and Network Applications (QTNA2016), Wellington, New Zealand, December 13–15, 2016” to submit their extended versions. We received in total 36 submissions from many countries all over the world. After a strict review process, we selected 11 papers to include in this special issue. The contents of the special issue can be classified into two groups; recent developments in queueing theory in the first six papers and advances in network applications in the next five papers.

We would like to thank all the authors who submitted their valuable papers to this special issue. Furthermore, we express our gratitude to all the referees of the special issue for their time to write top quality reviews which definitely helped the authors to improve the quality of their papers. Finally, we would like to thank the Editor-in-chief, Professor Endre Boros, for giving us an opportunity to edit this special issue. Last, but not the least, we sincerely thank the Publications Manager, Katie D’Agosta for her continuing support and assistance.