Toward Internet Photonic Sensing: Sensitivity Analysis of Commodity Transport Hardware

Internet Photonic Sensing (IPS) is the opportunistic use of signals from Internet optical transport hardware for vibration and deformation sensing. The vision of IPS is a highly sensitive, worldwide sensing capability based on existing hardware and infrastructure and operating in tandem with standard data delivery.

In this talk, we will present the findings of our ongoing evaluation regarding the capabilities of commodity Internet transport equipment to detect vibrations in optical fiber. The challenge in this work is that commodity optical transport hardware is designed to remove signal noise caused by vibrations on fiber. Our primary focus in this work is on changes in polarization of coherent optical signals sent and received by a state-of-the-art device that offers access to some aspects of polarization state. We assess the ability to utilize measurements of polarization in a series of controlled laboratory experiments that utilize different hardware configuration and subject fiber to different levels of strain. We also deploy on a fiber route on our campus and assess the ability of the device to detect levels of sensitivity to cultural sources of ground motion. The results of these experiments highlight the current opportunities and limitations of commodity devices to detect ground motion.