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Telecommunications networks based on optical fiber communication have been vastly deployed in the last years to cope with the increasing traffic demands. They cover wide terrestrial areas with thousands of kilometers of available fiber cables, arranged in meshed, rings or festoon network topologies. Moreover, their operation is becoming more and more software-defined thanks to the definition of open interfaces and data structures, transforming the infrastructure into a crucial commodity able to offer several network services.

Recently, the idea of using existing telecommunications fiber networks as a wide smart grid for environmental sensing is gaining momentum, since optical fiber can be used as an excellent mechanical stress sensors, as several physical effects are impacted by external stress. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) techniques deliver extremely accurate and spatially resolved measurements which are the state of the art, for example, in earthquake detection. However, its high cost, need for dark fibers and physical limitations prevent its wide deployment in telecom infrastructure.