The research group PoliCom lead by Prof. Pierpaolo Boffi from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano won the Best Paper Award for the paper "Optical Sensing in Urban Areas by Deployed Telecommunication Fiber Networks" by P. Boffi, M. Ferrario, I. Di Luch, G. Rizzelli e R. Gaudino, presented at the conference  ONDM 2022 - 26th International Conference on Optical Network Design and Modelling.

The paper presents the exploitation of the optical fiber telecommunications network, already installed in our cities for sensing purposes. In particular, the paper shows how the access fiber network operates as a sensor to monitor mecanical vibrations and the onset of dynamic stress (for exampel caused by an earthquake) in civil buildings and critical infrastructures connected to the Fiber-to-the-Home solutions. In the same way, the metropolitan area network is used fro real-time surveillance of the condition of the roads and of the telecommunications cable itself. The experimentation has been done in field using a fiber urban network already deployed in the city of Turin. The research is in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino.