Anagrafe della ricerca

SURENET project aims at the advancement of the operation of already deployed telecommunication (TLC) optical networks (ONs) to support urban infrastructures surveillance and monitoring through the exploitation of breakthrough fibre optic sensors (FOSs). ONs represent the enabling technology for backbone and metro-access networks, interconnecting final users and data centers to the global Internet across cities, regions, countries, continents to deliver ultra-broad band digital services. In the last decade and in particularly in these last two years (due to the increase of tele-teaching and tele-working), massive traffic growth rates pushed the ONs directly to the final user, with massive investments from private and public operators to deploy Fiber to the Home (FTTH). In the EU27 region, the official statistics [FTTH21] for 2021 showed that 20.5% of households are today reached by fiber (compound annual growth rate CAGR=16.6%). The presence of fibers is today ubiquitous, constituting a pervasive web covering the planet and in particular urban areas. There is a growing interest to use ONs not only for TLCs, but also for urban infrastructures remote monitoring through Fiber Optic Sensors (FOS): ONs can be exploited for monitoring purposes, providing an unprecedented fruitful synergy between TLC and sensing applications. The introduction of FOSs could be used to monitor physical parameters (such as strain, vibrations, anomalous events and temperature) along the fiber and enable their continuous space-time analysis over large areas. SURENET will focus on these topics, exploiting recently demonstrated unconventional, TLC-compatible sensing strategies to provide a real-time, monitoring of mechanical vibrations and thermal perturbations. SURENET will experimentally demonstrate the possibility of anomalies detection, such as dynamic stresses and anomalous vibrations in buildings passed by FTTH and Metro ONs, also monitoring seismic events or human-induced problem in civil infrastructures, focusing on increasing urban resilience and hazards early detection. Also innovative fibers such as multi-core fibers (MCFs) will be considered in order to add the spatial dimension to the portfolio of optical multiplexing technologies. FOSs adoption and their integration in standard TLC networks will represent a breakthrough innovation providing new tools for the real-time, dynamic study of anthropogenic, seismic and geophysical events. Optical monitoring will anyway not only useful for civil protection, but it is also greatly interesting for TLC operators, to improve the early-warning of anomalous events on the TLC infrastructure itself, through the continuous surveillance of the embedded network and real-time safety diagnostic. SURENET outcomes could support institutional decision makers in fields of civil to the environment protection, offering tools for the prompt detection of structural faults, seismic and natural hazards in populated areas.