Enabling cost-effective high-performance vibration sensing in digital subcarrier multiplexing systems

Abstract

Enabling communication networks with sensing functionality has attracted significant interest lately. The digital subcarrier multiplexing (DSCM) technology is widely promoted in short-reach scenarios for its inherent flexibility of fine-tuning the spectrum. Its compatibility with large-scale as-deployed coherent architectures makes it particularly suited for cost-sensitive integrated sensing and communication applications. In this paper, we propose a scheme of spectrally integrating the digital linear frequency modulated sensing signal into DSCM signals to achieve simultaneous sensing and communication through shared transmitter. Consequently, this cost-effective scheme has been demonstrated to achieve 100-Gb/s dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) and 200-Gb/s dual-polarization 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-16QAM) transmission with a distributed acoustic sensing sensitivity of 69 pε/Hz and 88 pε/Hz respectively, at a spatial resolution of 4 m.