Simultaneous distributed acoustic sensing and communication over a two-mode fiber

Opt Lett. 2022 Dec 15;47(24):6321-6324. doi: 10.1364/OL.473502.

Abstract

We designed and tested a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) that co-exists with optical communication over a two-mode fiber (TMF). In particular, we excited both linearly polarized (LP) modes, LP01 and LP11a, using a photonic lantern for simultaneous information signal transmission while collecting the backscattered Rayleigh light at the near end of the fiber to detect vibrations from a predetermined source. While transmitting data using on-off keying (OOK) or orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation schemes, the optical fiber DAS offers high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values that are always larger than the minimum acceptable 2 dB SNR. In addition, as a proof-of-concept experiment, we report parallel sensing and OFDM transmission achieving a data rate of up to 4.2 Gb/s with a bit error rate (BER) of 3.2 × 10-3.