Distributed sensing as a new tool for fibre infrastructure protection

  • 1 Department of optical networks – CESNET, the Czech Republic; Faculty of Electrical Engineering – Brno University of Technology, the Czech Republic
  • 2 Department of optical networks – CESNET, the Czech Republic

Abstract

Distributed fibre optic sensing is well known in defence or oil industry in use as acoustic sensing. Telecommunication networks are threatened by fibre cuts mainly caused by digging activity or theft. Many network operators seeking appropriate solution for selfprotecting infrastructure system. Most commercially available solutions of distributed sensing systems allow sensing only on dedicated fibres. Sharing the same infrastructure for data transmission and sensing is, however, more advantageous. On the other hand, it is necessary to solve the possible interaction of both services and thus the interference. We have developed our own sensing systems and we have made several measurements to evaluate the suitability of the most widely used distributed sensing techniques – interferometric, reflectometry and polarization for using in existing data infrastructures on optical fibres with active data traffic.

Keywords

References

  1. Munster P. Comparison of interferometry based and polarization based sensing systems for use in fibre infrastructure protection. In 2017 International Workshop on Fibre Optics in Access Network (FOAN), pages 1-3, Nov 2017.
  2. Wolifiski T.R. Polarization Properties Of Optical Fibres. In International Conference On Transparent Optical Networks (Cat. No. 99Ex350), 61-. IEEE. doi:10.1109/ICTON.1999.781845.
  3. Munster P. Distributed Sensing Based on Interferometry and Polarization Methods for Use in Fibre Infrastructure Protection. In 6th International Symposium on Sensor Science (I3S 2018) 06/08/2018-08/08/2018, Kenting, 2018.
  4. Vojtech J. Proactive protection of DWDM infrastructures. In ECOC conference, Rome, 2018.

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