Fibers are the infrastructure that most pervasively covers our planet. While primarily established for telecommunications, they can be exploited as a grid of distributed sensors fit for many purposes, from environmental monitoring to hazard prevention and alerting.
SENSEI will develop photonic technologies and novel network architectures to enable this transformation and implement the “network as a sensor” concept.
On one side, we will exploit the multitude of network elements enabling todays telecommunications as sensing nodes; on the other, we will develop highly-sensitive photonic techniques to probe fibers along their entire length, fitting the networks architectural constraints and -of course- causing no disruption to data traffic. We will leverage on the use of highly-coherent lasers as an asset to improve reach and sensitivity and work on their photonic integration, to ensure sustainability of this approach for global scale implementation.
However, fiber sensing is more than just taking data: we address the challenge of handling, combining and interpreting such a heterogeneous amount of data, turning it into exploitable information for ambitious goals like infrastructural monitoring, network resource optimization or early warning.
With a consortium including photonics developers, networking experts, Earth scientists and network providers, we aim to engage diverse communities to achieve a synergic and smarter exploitation of global networks for telecommunications, scientific research, and citizen protection.
Contributing scientific sectors
