A Large-scale Optical Fiber Sensor Network with Reconfigurable Routing Path Functionality

A novel large-scale three-layer-ring optical fiber sensor network is proposed with reconfigurable routing functionality. To provide large-scale sensing region as hybrid star-ring architecture and to provide robust self-healing function to deal with large amount of fiber-link failures as mesh architecture, the proposed architecture utilizes optical switches (SW) and new type of remote nodes (RNs) to compose the entire system in three layers. In the first layer, several fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors connect each other to compose a sensing subnet. In the second layer, several FBG sensing subnets connect each other by SWs to form the ringed sensing regions. In the third layer, each sensing region connects with central office by RNs. When fiber-link failure occurs in the system, the proposed three-layer-ring architecture can immediately restore the sensing signals by changing the status of the SWs and RNs in the sensing network. According to the simulation results, the proposed three-layer-ring architecture can completely restore the sensing signals when there are up to four break points occurring in a sensing region at the same time. The observed optical spectra of the received optical sensing signals in CO are roughly identical when the proposed architecture has no fiber-link failure or has up to four breakpoints.