Jamie Lynn is a former Research Assistant in the Optical Networking & Sensing group at NEC Laboratories America.

Posts

Turning Every Telecom Cable into a City-Wide Sensor Network

Verizon and NEC Laboratories America turned live telecom fiber into a city-wide sensing network. By repurposing existing optical infrastructure, the system detects vibrations along fiber routes, cutting cable damage incidents and improving response times. The approach also enables AI models that adapt to new, unseen routes without manual labeling.

Leveraging Deployed Telecom Cables for Distributed Fiber Sensing Topologies and Applications

Distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) has emerged as a promising technology for wide-area monitoring by utilizing existing telecom cables as large-scale sensing media. This paper explores three sensing modalities, backscattering-based sensing, forward-transmission-based sensing, and hybrid sensing, and discusses their respective benefits, challenges, and application domains. Backscattering sensing demonstrates strong potential for applications such as road traffic monitoring, pavement condition assessment, intrusion detection, and cabledamage prevention but is constrained in amplified dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) networks. Forward-transmission sensing enables sensing over operational telecom links with in-line amplification, extending sensing reach, although it involves trade-offs in spatial resolution and localization accuracy. To address these challenges, a hybrid sensing architecture that integrates backscattering and forward-transmission techniques is introduced, achieving enhanced sensing distance while maintaining high sensitivity and localization performance.In addition, this work incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) through a locally adaptive anomaly detection (LAAD) framework based on self-supervised representation learning. By leveraging location-based pretext tasks and unlabeled data, the proposed AI approach enables efficient adaptation across heterogeneous fiber routes and operational environments, significantly reducing reliance on labeled data while improving cross-domain generalization. Field trials over deployed telecom networks validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposedsensing and AI framework, demonstrating scalable, telecom-compatible DFOS for real-world infrastructure monitoring and intelligent network operations.

First Field Demonstration of Hollow-Core Fibre Supporting Distributed Acoustic Sensing and DWDM Transmission

We demonstrate a method for measuring the backscatter coefficient of hollow-core fibre (HCF), and show the feasibility of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) with simultaneous 9.6-Tb/s DWDM transmission over a 1.6-km field-deployed HCF cable.