Hybrid aperiodic coding for SNR improvement in a BOTDA fiber sensor

Opt Express. 2021 Oct 11;29(21):33926-33936. doi: 10.1364/OE.440675.

Abstract

The measurement accuracy of a Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) fiber sensor is determined by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received sensing signal. Here, a new hybrid aperiodic coding method is proposed to improve the SNR. In the proposed method, two pre-discovered short seed aperiodic codes (SA-codes) are used to construct a new hybrid aperiodic code (HA-code) in a nested way. The HA-code inherits the good denoising capabilities of the two SA-codes and features a high coding gain. In the proof-of-concept experiment, a SNR improvement up to 8 dB is obtained, which improves the measurement certainty to 1.67 MHz over a 117.46 km sensing range under a spatial resolution of 2.6 m.