The performance limit of coherent OTDR enhanced with optical fiber amplifiers due to optical nonlinear phenomena

This paper theoretically and experimentally clarifies the limit of incident optical pulse power in coherent optical time-domain reflectometry (C-OTDR) enhanced with optical fiber amplifiers. The critical pulse power, at which the performance of C-OTDR is degraded by the effect of optical nonlinear phenomena in a single-mode optical fiber, depends on the amplified optical pulse waveform and the pulse width. For a pulse width of 1 μs or longer, the incident pulse power is limited by the effect of self-phase modulation (SPM). When an optical pulse having a power gradient within the pulse width is incident to a single-mode optical fiber, the optical frequency of the backscattered signal is shifted by SPM, and the center frequency of the signal moves outside the receiver band, so the sensitivity of C-OTDR is degraded. For a pulse width of 100 ns, the incident optical pulse power is limited by four-wave mixing (FWM) which transfers the energy from the incident optical pulse to Stokes and anti-Stokes light as a result of the interaction between the incident optical pulse and amplified spontaneous emission. This paper also demonstrates the high performance of C-OTDR enhanced with EDF A´s with 48, 44, 39, and 29 dB single-way dynamic ranges for pulse widths of 10 μs, 4 μs, 1 μs, and 100 ns, respectively, limited by the effect of SPM or FWM. These results are believed to be the best performance of C-OTDR with EDFA´s