Coded phase-sensitive OTDR with delayed polarization multiplexing for a WFBG array

Polarization fading degrades the performance of phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (cp-OTDR) seriously and has to be suppressed. A novel scheme is proposed in this paper to combat polarization fading, which features a quite simple transceiver structure by exploiting both polarization diversity through delayed polarization multiplexing and the aperiodic autocorrelation of pseudorandom binary sequence. The components of Jones matrix of a sensing fiber are then shown at those four peaks of aperiodic autocorrelation and can be obtained directly without complicated computation to give a polarization independent phase variation due to vibration. Moreover, the scheme does not require stringent match between the delayed time and the spacing between sensors. The proposed scheme is demonstrated through experiment on a weak fiber Bragg grating (WFBG) array, which shows a high crosstalk rejection ratio among sensors of more than 50 dB and a high dynamic range of more than 30 dB.(c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed to combat polarization fading in cp-OTDR. It utilizes delayed polarization multiplexing and aperiodic autocorrelation to achieve a simple transceiver structure. The proposed scheme directly obtains the Jones matrix of the sensing fiber, providing polarization independent phase variation due to vibration. Experimental results on a WFBG array demonstrated a high crosstalk rejection ratio and dynamic range.