The ECSTATIC Project's Novel Sensing Approach

Optical communications networks are undergoing a transformative phase, driven by the dual demands for increased connectivity and real-time data acquisition. Recent developments in the field have highlighted the potential of integrating high-speed optical communication and sensing, offering an ambitious approach to data acquisition, monitoring, and network state analysis.

There is a real opportunity to transform the telecommunications networks, producing an enormous amount of data, into a globe-spanning distributed sensing system with applications ranging from environmental surveillance, such as earthquake and tsunami tracking, to infrastructure monitoring and anomaly detection. However, this requires reconsideration of the specifications of communications techniques, signal characteristics, and devices, as well as system designs and architectures to realize the potential for exploitation in other contexts, thereby leveraging considerable value from the significant costs of network installation.

To address this opportunity, ECSTATIC plans to design and develop novel interferometry and polarisation-based sensing technologies that substantially advance the state of the art in vibration and acoustic fiber-optic sensing techniques in terms of reach, sensitivity, and localization capabilities, by offering a wide palette of effective solutions that can be tailored in different use cases, while guaranteeing the coexistence of the sensing signal with live data traffic. New light-based technologies will be integrated with advanced DSP and machine learning techniques, enhancing their performance.

Furthermore, the project will produce systems for real-time digital signal acquisition capable of detecting and characterizing environmental effects and monitoring in real-time the properties of the communication channel, including its nonlinear characteristics. These developments are essential for the envisaged real-world application of the ECSTATIC technologies and will enable the monitoring of different events (natural events, mechanical vibrations, ambient noise, structural health) and channel quality (power, nonlinear effects, etc.) in real-time.

ECSTATIC is a unique initiative that seeks to evaluate the most important fiber-optic sensing techniques in real-life telecommunication infrastructures, integrating high-speed optical communication with distributed sensing, and offering real-time data acquisition, monitoring, and analysis. This integration promises to enhance the intelligent functionalities of ubiquitous optical networks, pushing the boundaries of what is achievable with traditional optical communication systems. At the end of the project, a thorough understanding of the capabilities, cost, and compatibility with telecom infrastructure will be used to initiate standardization of fiber-optic sensing in operational network environments.