Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation for C-Band Shared FBG Sensing and Telecommunications

The telecommunications data transfer in single-mode (SM) optical fiber (OF) of a passive optical network (PON) is managed by dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA). In most Internet of Things (IoT) sensor network applications, both raw sensing signals and telecommunication data are transmitted in SM OFs, too. At the present time, this is not done in a shared SM OF. This article presents a novel concept to share fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing and telecommunication services (TS) in the optical C-band of the shared transmission. This concept is based on statistical detection and monitoring of FBGs sensing signals. The key steps of the proposed concept are FBG power spectral peaks statistical detection, monitoring of the FBGs dynamics, and periodical estimation of telecommunication channels (TChs) occupancy and availability. The proposed concept was demonstrated and validated using the sensor network with a deployed group of FBG-based sensors, by implementing various static or dynamic approaches. By doing so, we achieved TChs bandwidth availability approaching 80%, compared to previously wasted bandwidth with availability at most 15.6%. The experimental results showed that a DBA system with implemented dynamic TChs occupancy is a reliable way to share fiber bandwidth between both FBG sensing and TChs.