Why fibre sensing?
In the past few years, fibre sensing has emerged as a hot new topic at prestigious events like the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference, or in publications from industry and policy, including the European Commission (EC) and National Science Foundation (NSF). In this introductory article, we won’t go deep into different state-of-the-art technologies, subtle light properties used to detect unwanted events along the fibre, or AI-assisted learning. Nor will we focus on fibre sensors for medical, healthcare or control applications. Instead, we will look at terrestrial fibre sensing applications using telecommunications and data fibre networks, with a focus on two standard sensing technologies: Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and State of Polarization (SoP). DAS is the de facto standard technology that is based on well-known OTDR principles. It usually tends to generate large volumes of data. SOP, perhaps less familiar within the NREN community, is based on a principle many will recognise from antireflection sunglasses or camera lenses. It’s used less frequently but produces a reasonable amount of data.
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2. September 2025