NEDS Exhibition Defence & Security, Rotterdam 10 November 2026

Fiber Optic Sensing for a More Resilient Defence Ecosystem

European defence and resilience budgets are growing, and a large share of what they have to cover is linear: borders, base perimeters, energy corridors, rail, ports and the communications routes between them. Protecting a line is a different problem from protecting a point, and it is the one fiber optic sensing for defence and security is built around. BiiSensing will be at NEDS 2026, the NIDV Exhibition Defence & Security, at Rotterdam Ahoy on 19 November.

The gap-free perimeter in fiber optic sensing for defence

Conventional perimeter security is a set of devices with coverage between them. Cameras have fields of view, and the areas outside them are not observed. Point sensors observe their own location. On a compact site the gaps are manageable because the distances are short. Along 20 km of fence or 60 km of border they are the whole problem.

Distributed acoustic sensing inverts that. A single fiber along the route is read continuously from end to end, and every metre of it is a measurement point. Our Eagle DAS covers up to 50 km of fiber from one unit, up to 100 km with optical repeaters, with channel spacing from 0.1 m. There is no between.

The second property matters as much. Nothing in the field needs power. The cable is passive, so there is no emission to detect, no device to disable, and no maintenance visit per sensor. For a route through terrain where reaching a given point takes hours, that changes the operating cost more than it changes the capability.

What fiber optic sensing for defence reports

Each event is returned as a classification and a distance along the cable:

• Intrusion on foot, including a single person crossing the line.
• Vehicle movement, separable by weight class and speed.
• Digging and tunneling, which is sustained and mechanically distinct.
• Tampering with the cable or the fence it follows.
• Impacts, located along the covered length.

Position is what makes this actionable. A detection reported as a distance on a known route puts a response team at the right place, rather than starting a search along a corridor. More detail in security detection.

The same fiber protects the asset it follows

Perimeter monitoring is usually the entry application, and it rarely stays the only one. A cable installed along a route also reports on the route:

• Cable monitoring, where interference with buried or submarine communications is both a security and a continuity concern.
• Pipeline monitoring, where third-party interference and leakage share an instrument.
• Structural health monitoring of bridges and tunnels on protected routes.
• Smart Port, where perimeter, quayside structure and cable landings sit in one facility.

For a resilience programme, one deployment answering to both a security and an operations owner is normally what makes the budget work.

A fiber optic sensing for defence rollout that survives review

Covering an entire perimeter or corridor at once produces a number that tends to stall in procurement. Staging it around consequence produces evidence instead, and the evidence is what funds the next stage:

• Stage one. The highest-consequence section, usually where a breach reaches something critical fastest. One interrogator, one cabinet.
• Stage two. The least-observed section, using the range headroom on the same unit. Up to 50 km of fiber per interrogator means the second stage is often cable and splicing rather than new hardware.
• Stage three. The infrastructure reading on the same fiber, once the security case has produced findings the operations team recognizes.

The sequence matters because the first stage has to generate detections that somebody on shift agrees were real. That is what makes the second request straightforward.

The hard part of fiber optic sensing for defence is the false alarm rate

We would rather say this at a stand than after a trial. Detection sensitivity is not the limiting factor in perimeter deployments. Classification is. A long fiber at a high acquisition rate will register weather, livestock, farm machinery and road traffic, and a system that forwards all of it is quickly ignored by the people meant to act on it. Getting to a workable alert rate means tuning against the specific route and continuing to tune after commissioning, which is why we deliver these as engineered deployments with local support and training in Spanish and English rather than as a shipped box.

If you are at NEDS and want a technical conversation rather than a brochure, come and find us. Industry matchmaking runs the day before, on 18 November.

Event details

• Event: NEDS 2026, NIDV Exhibition Defence & Security
• Date: 19 November 2026, 08:00 to 17:00
• Venue: Rotterdam Ahoy, Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Also: Industry matchmaking on 18 November
• Organizer: NIDV

Talk to an Engineer and tell us what you need to monitor. We will tell you whether fiber sensing is the right fit, and how to deploy it.