Integrated communication and distributed acoustic sensing for online co-trench detection in a DWDM network

Integrated sensing and optical communication based on distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provides a promising framework for intelligent management of fiber-optic infrastructure. Leveraging the rich spatial–temporal information captured by DAS, we experimentally demonstrate online co-trench detection and accurate fiber-slack identification in a live 40-channel 800 Gb/s DWDM network. The DAS signal is fully co-transmitted with DWDM traffic through wavelength-division multiplexing. Two sensing use cases—co-trench detection and slack-loop detection—are validated using ambient environmental vibrations. The results confirm the feasibility of integrated communication-and-sensing in a real DWDM network, paving the way toward intelligent and autonomous DWDM networks.