Recently, the group led by Prof. Rao Yunjiang, director of the Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications (Ministry of Education) at the School of Information and Communication Engineering of the University of Electronic Science & Technology of China (UESTC), published a research paper entitled "Seamless integration of distributed acoustic sensing and passive optical networks for human intrusion monitoring" inCommunications Engineering, the first engineering sub-journal ofNature. This is the first paper published inCommunications Engineeringby the UESTC’s A+ discipline of Information and Communication Engineering. Ph.D student Tang Rong is the first author while Prof. Rao Yunjiang is the sole corresponding author. This work proposes and demonstrates a novel seamless integration architecture of optical fiber sensing and communication (IFSAC) network, for the first time, capable of transforming existing and ubiquitous fiber-to-the-home infrastructure—passive optical networks (PON) into distributed optical fiber sensing networks with monitoring functions for perimeter security applications. This work has wide application prospects and provides a new approach for redefining all-optical access networks, marking a milestone in the development of the IFSAC research direction. It is worth mentioned that the concept of IFSAC was originally proposed by Prof. Rao Yunjiang in 2007 (National 863 Project) and experimentally verified for the first time in 2009, which has now become a new research direction in the field of optical fibers.
Communications Engineeringis the first engineering sub-journal of the internationally renowned journalNature, focusing on the publication of original and high-level research achievements in the field of engineering. Since its inception in 2022, the journal just publishes <100 papers annually, showing its quite high academic standard.This work was supported by the Key Project of the Joint Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China ‘Basic Theory and Key Technology Research on Integrated Optical Fiber Communication and Sensing Networks’ (Grant No. U21A20453) and the Top Academic Achievement Cultivation Project for Basic Research of UESTC ‘Basic Research on New Generation Integrated Optical Fiber Sensing and Communication Networks’.
Full paper link：https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-026-00662-z
