Distributed sensing encompasses two complementary disciplines that have converged in strategic importance over the past decade. The first is fibre-based distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) — also called distributed fibre-optic sensing (DFOS) or phase-OTDR — in which a coherent laser interrogator launches optical pulses into a standard single-mode telecom fibre and analyses the Rayleigh backscatter returning from every metre of the cable. Any strain or vibration acting on the fibre — footsteps, vehicle wheels, digging, voices, helicopter rotors, seismic events — modulates the optical phase of the backscattered light; that modulation is recovered, geo-located at metre-level resolution along the cable, and classified against an acoustic signature library. A single 50 km run yields 50,000 simultaneous virtual microphones sampled at kilohertz rates with no power or electronics required in the field. Distributed temperature sensing (DTS) using Raman or Brillouin backscatter performs the same feat for thermal signatures; distributed strain sensing captures slow mechanical loading events — including anchor drag, the precursor to deliberate cable cut. The second discipline is RF distributed sensor mesh networks: arrays of compact software-defined radio nodes that collectively monitor the electromagnetic spectrum across wide areas, sharing IQ data or derived intelligence over a backhaul network to build a real-time, geolocated RF picture that no individual sensor could produce alone. Both branches have been transformed by the same forces — cheap wideband digital receivers, GPU and FPGA signal processing, and low-latency mesh networking — and both are natural territory for this conference.
Australia is building sovereign capability across both branches. Fleet Space Technologies — headquartered in Adelaide — received $1.6 million through the Defence Innovation Partnership’s Activator Fund in April 2025 for the SENTRI project (Sensor-based Environmental sense-making Network for Threat Response and Information), combining the company’s LEO satellite network with a distributed ground sensor array for real-time threat detection, disaster response, and continental-scale border protection, with DSTG among the project partners. At RAAF Edinburgh, DSTG’s Sensor and Trials Facility has been restructured as a collaborative distributed sensing hub, supporting a permanent trials network for novel RF and electro-optic sensor capabilities across South Australia. Internationally, the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator has been running the Bright Corvus programme — a four-year MOD initiative for distributed RF-based ISR, integrated effects, and Position Navigation and Timing as a Service — funding fifteen to twenty proposals through a £2.8 million themed competition. UK company CRFS produces the RFeye Node, a software-defined RF sensor under 2 kg that NATO nations have deployed as networked arrays across airbases and national airspace; the RFeye Node 100-18 LW won the Army Technology Excellence Award 2024. In the fibre sensing space, leading industry players include OptaSense (whose DAS border monitoring systems are in operational use across North America and the Middle East), AP Sensing, Sintela, and Luna Innovation (which acquired Silixa in 2024); legacy leaky-coaxial perimeter systems from Senstar and Southwest Microwave remain in widespread use at military bases and critical infrastructure worldwide. Strong academic and national-laboratory programmes operate at NPL (UK), Stanford, Caltech, Sandia and Warsaw University of Technology.
The connection to software-defined radio is direct on both sides of the discipline. A DAS interrogator is a coherent SDR operating on optical rather than radio carriers: its DSP back-end performs phase-coherent demodulation, IQ down-conversion, FFT-based localisation, spatial beamforming across the cable’s virtual microphone array, machine-learning classification of acoustic signatures, and adaptive clutter cancellation — the same signal-processing chain an RF engineer works with every day, with the antenna replaced by a kilometre-scale optical sensor. RF distributed sensing networks are even more directly in this conference’s territory: each node is typically a wideband SDR receiver with an embedded processor for local feature extraction, and the network-level algorithms — distributed detection, track fusion, emitter geolocation by TDOA and FDOA, cooperative spectrum monitoring — are exactly the problems GNU Radio, open-source FPGA gateware, and the signal-processing community have been developing for two decades. Both domains share the same fundamental challenge: turning massive parallel streams of complex samples into actionable intelligence at low false-alarm rates, in real time, with constrained compute and backhaul bandwidth.
The strategic stakes for submarine cable infrastructure sharpened considerably in late 2024. The November 2024 Baltic Sea cable-cut incidents — in which multiple NATO-nation cables were severed and a Chinese cargo vessel was identified in the vicinity — moved subsea cable security from contingency planning into live operational concern across Five Eyes nations. Research published in 2025 demonstrated AI-enabled vessel detection on operational submarine DAS networks, training convolutional neural networks to separate weak ship signatures from background noise in real time; broader ocean-space surveillance using submarine DAS has been demonstrated for earthquakes, underwater explosions, sonic booms from supersonic aircraft, and cetacean acoustic activity on Arctic cables. Every dark-fibre spare pair in a country’s telecom backbone is consequently a potential distributed border-surveillance, perimeter-protection, and critical-infrastructure sensor requiring no new in-ground hardware to instantiate. For Australia — with 36,000 km of coastline, vast ungarrisoned maritime approaches, and submarine cable infrastructure carrying the bulk of the nation’s international data traffic — fibre-based and RF-distributed sensing combined with SDR-style processing represents one of the most cost-effective sovereign-surveillance multipliers available.
Applications span the full breadth of the conference audience: border and perimeter intrusion detection along fencelines, roads and coastlines; counter-UAS RF sensing using low-cost mesh nodes deployed at scale; submarine cable monitoring for hybrid-threat detection; maritime domain awareness through distributed HF surface-wave radar arrays; seismic and ocean-acoustic environmental monitoring; continent-wide spectrum monitoring for signals intelligence and spectrum management; and open experiments using KiwiSDR as a globally networked HF receiver array, OpenWebRX for web-accessible distributed SDR, or low-cost LoRa mesh nodes for amateur perimeter sensing. We welcome papers, demonstrations and panel contributions at every scale — from continental sovereign sensor networks like SENTRI down to a Raspberry Pi mesh on a university campus — at SDR Conference 2026.