STLFM-based integration of sensing and secure communication in optical fiber
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Published on: January 7, 2019
Ying Wu1, Shuang Wei1, Xiangyu Liu1
1The State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
Integrated sensing and communication in optical fiber (ISAC-OF) provides a promising solution for innovative applications such as smart cities, intelligent transportation, and ocean monitoring. However, dedicated sensing waveforms may increase the observability of optical links and introduce additional physical-layer security risks. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an integrated sensing and secure communication scheme for optical fiber links. Quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) is used to protect the confidentiality of payload symbols, while a symmetric triangular linear frequency modulation (STLFM) waveform is reused as a training sequence for communication and as a probing waveform for distributed sensing. QNSC inherently introduces a transmission penalty due to ciphertext constellation expansion. Compared with a repeated-QPSK training sequence reference, STLFM provides more accurate and stable frame-start estimation and more effective frequency offset compensation (FOC), thereby reducing receiver impairments and improving signal recovery. In a 200 Gbit/s, 100 km simulation, the proposed scheme achieves a received-power gain of 1.49 dB at the 7% HD-FEC threshold compared with a repeated-QPSK training sequence reference. In a 10 Gbit/s, 10.1 km proof-of-concept experiment, a received-power gain of 1 dB is obtained under the same threshold. The eavesdropper bit error rate (BER), together with the number of masked signals (NMS) and detection failure probability (DFP) evaluations, indicates that quantum noise masking increases ciphertext-state ambiguity and enhances payload confidentiality. For sensing, the scheme reconstructs distributed vibration signals along the 10.1 km fiber and achieves a spatial resolution of 3.9 m and a strain resolution of 22.37 nε/√(Hz). These results show that secure communication and distributed vibration sensing can be jointly realized over the same fiber link, while the shared STLFM waveform improves signal recovery.
