Large-scale remotely pumped and interrogated fiber-optic interferometric sensor array

We report a demonstration of a large-scale remotely interrogated remotely pumped fiber-optic, interferometric sensor array. The system is designed primarily for underwater acoustic applications where each sensor is configured as a hydrophone and a large number of sensors (i.e., up to~500) are required to be interrogated through link lengths of several tens of kilometers. A system comprising of 96 sensors combined using time and dense wavelength-division multiplexing and interrogated through a 40-km fiber link is demonstrated. A remotely pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier is incorporated into the array to increase the distance between the array and interrogation electronics. We describe the performance of our system and validate a previously published model.