INSIGHT

As both fiber-based sensing and optical telecommunications confront significant challenges in terms of performance demand, environmental responsibility and potentially reducing profit margins, the prospect of the coexistence of these technologies in combined platforms presents itself as an clear opportunity for industry, society and academia. The road for integration, though, is far from obvious. Although fiber-based sensing and optical communications share a common transmission medium, they have been developed separately from the ground up to push their individual performance boundaries without considering their eventual co-existence. This means that the constraints and requirements for the underlying technologies for each of them are often far from compatible, with exploratory research and recent tests hinting at the fact that, in most situations, co-existence would come at the cost of a great reduction in performance for one or both of the integrated applications. The goal of our proposed Doctoral Network is to use the combined expertise of our academic and industrial partners to provide a new generation of engineers and researchers with a complete vision of the design, optimisation, implementation and integration of optical fiber sensors and communication networks, their limits and their requirements in the context of current and envisioned future challenges, from the device to the system level.