Bipolar optical pulse coding for performance enhancement in BOTDA sensors

• DOI: 10.1364/oe.21.016390
• Publication Date: 2013-07-02T22:06:53Z
• Authors: Marcelo A. Soto; Sébastien Le Floch; Luc Thévenaz
• Keywords: Binary Golay code; Amplified spontaneous emission; Robustness; Brillouin zone

A pump signal based on bipolar pulse coding and single-sideband suppressed-carried (SSB-SC) modulation is proposed for Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) sensors. Making a sequential use of the gain loss spectra, technique experimentally validated using complementary-correlation Golay codes along 100 km-long fiber 2 m spatial resolution, fully resolving hot-spot at end sensing with no distortion introduced by decoding algorithm. Experimental results, in good agreement theory, indicate that provide higher signal-to-noise ratio enhancement stronger robustness to depletion comparison optimum unipolar known BOTDA sensing.