Telecom Infrastructure encompasses the physical and logical assets that enable telecommunications services, including fiber-optic cables, conduits, manholes, towers, amplifiers, switching equipment, and data centers. Beyond carrying network traffic, these assets represent a densely distributed physical presence across urban and rural environments. In sensing research, existing telecom infrastructure serves as a platform for deploying distributed fiber-optic sensors capable of detecting temperature, strain, vibration, and other environmental signals without additional hardware installation.
We review recent progress in forward-transmission fibre sensing from a practical perspective, revisit the fundamental challenges in the localisation performance, and discuss possible approaches to improve event localisation accuracy.
We present field trial on urban monitoring over telecom networks using Rayleigh-based distributed temperature/ strain sensor (DTSS), showing the capability of detecting subtle infrastructure signatures including manhole locations, road traffic, sprinklers and underground leakage events.