Integrated sensing and communication in an optical fibre

Haijun He; Lin Jiang; Yan Pan; Anlin Yi; Xihua Zou; Wei Pan; Alan E Willner; Xinyu Fan; Zuyuan He; Lianshan Yan

doi:10.1038/s41377-022-01067-1

Integrated sensing and communication in an optical fibre

Light Sci Appl. 2023 Jan 17;12(1):25. doi: 10.1038/s41377-022-01067-1.

Authors

Haijun He¹, Lin Jiang^{1

2}, Yan Pan¹, Anlin Yi¹, Xihua Zou¹, Wei Pan¹, Alan E Willner³, Xinyu Fan⁴, Zuyuan He⁴, Lianshan Yan^{5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Information Photonics & Communications, School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, 611756, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
² Peng Cheng Laboratory, 518052, Shenzhen, China.
³ Optical Fiber Communications Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240, Shanghai, China.
⁵ Center for Information Photonics & Communications, School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, 611756, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. lsyan@home.swjtu.edu.cn.
⁶ Peng Cheng Laboratory, 518052, Shenzhen, China. lsyan@home.swjtu.edu.cn.

Abstract

The integration of high-speed optical communication and distributed sensing could bring intelligent functionalities to ubiquitous optical fibre networks, such as urban structure imaging, ocean seismic detection, and safety monitoring of underground embedded pipelines. This work demonstrates a scheme of integrated sensing and communication in an optical fibre (ISAC-OF) using the same wavelength channel for simultaneous data transmission and distributed vibration sensing. The scheme not only extends the intelligent functionality for optical fibre communication system, but also improves its transmission performance. A periodic linear frequency modulation (LFM) light is generated to act as the optical carrier and sensing probe in PAM4 signal transmission and phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR), respectively. After a 24.5 km fibre transmission, the forward PAM4 signal and the carrier-correspondence Rayleigh backscattering signal are detected and demodulated. Experimental results show that the integrated solution achieves better transmission performance (~1.3 dB improvement) and a larger launching power (7 dB enhancement) at a 56 Gbit/s bit rate compared to a conventional PAM4 signal transmission. Meanwhile, a 4 m spatial resolution, 4.32-nε/[Formula: see text] strain resolution, and over 21 kHz frequency response for the vibration sensing are obtained. The proposed solution offers a new path to further explore the potential of existing or future fibre-optic networks by the convergence of data transmission and status sensing. In addition, such a scheme of using shared spectrum in communication and distributed optical fibre sensing may be used to measure non-linear parameters in coherent optical communications, offering possible benefits for data transmission.