SAFER

The project SAFER was a 2022 winner of the PREMATURATION call for projects, led by the Innovation Lab of IP Paris.

Cities grow denser and denser. Safety and durability of facilities such as vehicle traffic, human presence detection or civil infrastructures is becoming a critical issue. More and more sensors and AI are needed for city monitoring. 
Nevertheless, several hundred of fiber-optic telecommunications cables already crisscross cities and already interconnect urban areas. They are used for data transmission but can also be used to monitor urban environments without adding new sensors. 
SAFER aims at providing wide-scale supervision and health diagnostic solution for deployed infrastructure and alert infrastructure operators of threats and accidents to preserve the integrity of their assets and reduce the outage time of their services. 

• Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS)
  • Based on Rayleigh backscattering of light
  • Detection of phase variation due to strain events impacting the fiber
  • Detection of multiple strain events along a fiber cable based on the roundtrip propagation time of the scattered signals
• DAS deployed over existing telecom fiber cables
  • No need to deploy dedicated fibers
  • Detect vibrations impacting other infrastructure assets in the vicinity of fiber cables

• DAS architecture adapted for coexistence of sensing with data transmission over access networks, specifically passive optical networks (PON)
  • Zero impact on data transmission (seamless integration!)
  • Removal of fiber ambiguity problem in 1-to-N-fibre architectures (wider coverage!)
  • Minimal modification of hardware in the network (low cost!)
  • No requirement for sensors dedicated to infrastructure monitoring.