Environmental Sensing using Deployed Optical Network Infrastructures

We propose an optical network architecture aimed at exploiting the telecommunication infrastructure also as a sensing network using the propagating optical data and service signals to sense mechanical stress on the deployed fiber optic and using the network nodes as sensing receiver unit. We have experi- mentally monitored the mechanical stresses induced by anthropic activities acting on the deployed fiber optic detecting the SOP temporal variations on 10G data channels. Data acquired from a metropolitan optical cable show the effective application of the proposed technique in monitoring and classifying road traffic.