Optical fiber sensors as the primary element in the protection of critical infrastructure especially in optoelectronic transmission lines

Abstract

The security systems of the wide area objects are dominated by fiber optic sensors, used primarily to perimeter protection as well as to the protection of vast objects such as pipelines. Critical infrastructure objects are not only industrial facilities but also the transmission lines. Authors present the sensor systems compared to sensors for extensive object security currently available on the market. The designed systems, such as double interferometer system as well as more and more popular QKD systems are sensors with distributed sensing field. These systems, described by authors in many publications, are excellent solutions for the protection of wide area infrastructural objects. Presented fiber sensors, besides sabotage detection also offer the possibility of locating the disturbance along many kilometers of the zone. The solution presented in this paper was designed to adapt well known solutions to the physical protection of the transmission line without interfering with the transmitted data. According to the knowledge of potential threats of fiber optic telecommunications, the authors present methods of protecting fiber optics telecommunication cable, and present their own solutions and describe their application possibilities. © 2013 WIT Press.