SURENET - Surveillance of the URban Environment exploiting deployed optical NETworks aims at the advancement of the operation of already deployed telecommunication optical networks to support urban infrastructures surveillance and monitoring through the exploitation of breakthrough fiber optic sensors.

SURENET will focus on the exploitation of recently demonstrated unconventional optical sensing strategies to provide real-time monitoring of mechanical vibrations and thermal perturbations. SURENET will experimentally demonstrate the possibility of anomalies detection, such as dynamic stresses and anomalous vibrations in buildings passed by FTTH (Fiber To The Home), also monitoring seismic events or human-induced problem in civil infrastructures, focusing on increasing urban resilience and hazards early detection. Also innovative fibers such as multi-core fibers will be considered in order to add the spatial dimension to the portfolio of optical multiplexing technologies.

The adoption of optical fiber sensors and their integration in standard telecommunications networks will represent a breakthrough innovation providing new tools for the real-time, dynamic study of anthropogenic, seismic and geophysical events. Optical monitoring will anyway not only useful for civil protection, but it is also greatly interesting for telecommunications operators, to improve the early-warning of anomalous events on the telecommunications infrastructure itself, through the continuous surveillance of the embedded network and real-time safety diagnostic. SURENET outcomes could support institutional decision makers in fields of civil to the environment protection, offering tools for the prompt detection of structural faults, seismic and natural hazards in populated areas.