Recent progress in the performance enhancement of phase-sensitive OTDR vibration sensing systems

Abstract

Recently, phase-sensitive Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (Φ-OTDR)-based vibration sensor systems have gained the interest of many researchers and some efforts have been undertaken to push the performance limitations of Φ-OTDR sensor systems. Thus, progress in different areas of their performance evaluation factors such as improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), spatial resolution (SR) in the sub-meter range, enlargement of the sensing range, increased frequency response bandwidth over the conventional limits, phase signal demodulation and chirped-pulse Φ-OTDR for quantitative measurement have been realized. This paper presents an overview of the recent progress in Φ-OTDR-based vibration sensing systems in the different areas mentioned above.