April 23, 2025, On the afternoon of the first day of OFC 2025, there was a workshop titled "Communication and Sensing Together: Is It a Healthy Relationship?" High-speed communication and multi-parameter environmental sensing present a transformative opportunity for enhancing the monitoring of existing network architectures and data transmission. What this workshop aimed to discuss was whether ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication) could actually be useful for both communication and sensing networks. The concept of ISAC is popularly known as "integrated sensing and communication" in China, and it is also a hot topic. At this year's OFC, there were also several discussions on this topic, but its popularity was obviously not comparable to that of CPO and other concepts.
Yesterday, at the coal equipment exhibition in Taiyuan, the editor saw major transmission companies such as Huawei, GENEW, and Raisecom, as well as fiber optic sensing manufacturers like Micro-sensor, AGIOE, and AllianStream. The so-called "integrated sensing and communication" is essentially the same as the slogan of smart mines that can be seen everywhere at the exhibition, or it serves as the foundation for it. Why can't smart mines become a real example of ISAC?
Among the speakers invited to the discussion session at OFC were representatives from transmission equipment manufacturers such as ADTRAN and NOKIA, operators like NTT, the Norwegian nearshore oil communication network operator TAMPNET, as well as representatives from the FMCW LiDAR manufacturer SiLC and professors from several universities. When I entered the conference room, the person from TAMPENT was giving a presentation, so I left with an impression. However, judging from the company's website, although they also provide fiber optic networks, several of their cases are based on 4G communication. In fact, the concept of ISAC initially started from the integration of radar and communication, and it is also a key focus in the research of 6G mobile communication currently.
Of course, our main focus is more on the integration of fiber optic communication networks and fiber optic sensing networks. Wu Bingbing, a chief engineer at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, pointed out at a forum last year that fiber optic cables have both information transmission and sensing functions at the same time. The optical communication network is also the underlying carrier of computing power infrastructure. It can form an integrated and efficient optical network architecture system that enables large bandwidth and low latency communication, real-time status perception, and computing power scheduling on demand, achieving mutual enhancement through the integration of communication, sensing, and computing. This system can be applied to scenarios such as optical cable operation management, oil and gas pipeline network monitoring, power line monitoring, geological environment and fire monitoring and early warning, perimeter security, and submarine cable monitoring and early warning. The current technical challenges in the cross-integration of fiber optic sensing, communication, and computing mainly lie in areas such as ultra-long-distance sensing, solving the crosstalk between sensing and communication signals, finding suitable event pattern recognition algorithms, and networking technical solutions.
Yesterday in Taiyuan, Manager Meng from Micro-sensor Photonics told the editor that the current problem with fiber optic sensing systems is still the high cost. The cost of key components, such as tunable lasers, is too high. The ability to combine with communication networks to reduce costs and expand the user base is undoubtedly good news for the fiber optic sensing industry. The final question is still the one from that workshop at OFC:Can ISAC technologies make a transition from research to market within next 5 years?
