For the first time in the world, communication equipment monitoring technology utilizing vibration sensed by communication optical fiber as a sensor is demonstrated.

Grasping environmental information of the city and aiming to utilize it for disaster countermeasures.

Tokyo - September 27, 2021 - NTT Corporation (TYO:9432), today announced that NTT has demonstrated a technology to measure vibrations in optical fibers with extremely high accuracy, aiming to realize environmental monitoring that uses existing optical fiber cables for communications as sensors to obtain environmental information around the cables. Using this technology, we were the first in the world to detect the propagation of minute vibrations in an aerial optical fiber cable¹ in the longitudinal direction of the optical fiber (vibration propagation pattern). Since the point of change in the vibration propagation pattern can be used as an index to specify the location of the communication equipment on the vibration distribution waveform, it is expected that the point of occurrence of various events obtained by various optical fiber measurement techniques can be specified with high accuracy not only from the length of the optical fiber from the conventional measuring instrument but also from the location of the equipment on the vibration distribution waveform.

By establishing this technology, we aim to realize environmental monitoring using the existing optical fiber cable network as a sensor in the IOWN era, and to contribute to solving various social issues by utilizing the obtained environmental information in various industrial fields. These results will be published in the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology in December.

In order to realize environmental monitoring, it is necessary to establish and combine various elemental technologies. In the future, we will work to improve positioning accuracy by further upgrading measurement technology, examine resistance to disturbance, examine the handling of large-scale measurement data derived from high-precision measurement, and examine data analysis and interpretation using AI, machine learning, etc. In the IOWN era, we will implement optical fiber environmental monitoring using existing optical fiber cable networks as sensors, and aim to contribute to solving various social issues such as disaster countermeasures and monitoring infrastructure facilities.

¹Optical fiber cables installed outdoors using utility poles

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