Fully Unsupervised Detection of Physical Contacts on Subsea Cables via State-of-Polarization Monitoring

We present a fully unsupervised Fast-Slow DSVDD detector for continuous State-of-Polarization monitoring on a deployed subsea cable. Trained without event labels, it ranks all five confirmed trawler contacts within the top 13 of 122,174 recordings and surfaces additional corroborated cable-contact events.

Sea-Scan: High-Accuracy, ML-based Dark Vessel Detection and Localisation via Weakly Supervised DAS Monitoring

We present an ML-based vessel detection and localization system, trained with weak supervision from imperfect AIS labels, that achieves a 97.8% detection rate at 1.98% false-trigger rate, successfully identifies dark-vessel events from unlabeled data.

Deep Learning Based Multi-Step Channel Prediction for Adaptive Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems

We develop an adaptive OFDM framework for underwater acoustic communications based on PatchCSI-T, a Transformer-based multistep channel prediction model with feature-independent modeling and parameter sharing. Combined with a greedy adaptive modulation and power allocation scheme, the proposed approach enables accurate, low-latency CSI forecasting and improves end-to-end BER and spectral efficiency on real-world UWA channel datasets.

Interference Detection in Spectrum-Blind Multi-User Optical Spectrum as a Service

With the growing demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency applications, Optical Spectrum as a Service (OSaaS) is of interest for flexible bandwidth allocation within Elastic Optical Networks (EONs) and Open Line Systems (OLS). While OSaaS facilitates transparent connectivity and resource sharing among users, it raises concerns over potential network vulnerabilities due to shared fiber access and inter-channel interference, such as fiber non-linearity and amplifier based crosstalk. These challenges are exacerbated in multi-user environments, complicating the identification and localization of service interferences. To reduce system disruptions and system repair costs, it is beneficial to detect and identify such interferences timely. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces a Machine Learning (ML) based architecture for network operators to detect and attribute interferences to specific OSaaS users while blind to the users' internal spectrum details. Our methodology leverages available coarse power measurements and operator channel performance data, bypassing the need for internal user information of wide-band shared spectra. Experimental studies conducted on a 190 km optical line system in the Open Ireland testbed, with three OSaaS users demonstrate the model's capability to accurately classify the source of interferences, achieving a classification accuracy of 90.3%.

A Robust ADMM-Based Optimization Algorithm For Underwater Acoustic Channel Estimation

Accurate estimation of the Underwater acoustic (UWA) is a key part of underwater communications, especially for coherent systems. The severe multipath effects and large delay spreads make the estimation problem large-scale. The non-stationary, non-Gaussian, and impulsive nature of ocean ambient noise poses further obstacles to the design of estimation algorithms. Under the framework of compressed sensing (CS), this work addresses the issue of robust channel estimation when measurements are contaminated by impulsive noise. A first-order algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed. Numerical simulations of time-varying channel estimation are performed to show its improved performance in highly impulsive noise environments.

Self-Normalizing Neural Network, Enabling One Shot Transfer Learning for Modeling EDFA Wavelength Dependent Gain

We present a novel ML framework for modeling the wavelength-dependent gain of multiple EDFAs, based on semi-supervised, self-normalizing neural networks, enabling one-shot transfer learning. Our experiments on 22 EDFAs in Open Ireland and COSMOS testbeds show high-accuracy transfer-learning even when operated across different amplifier types.