Distributed measurement of the chromatic dispersion of an optical fiber using a wavelength-tunable OTDR

In this paper, a distributed measurement of the chromatic dispersion (CD) of an optical fiber is presented. The measurement is based on the analysis of a set of bidirectional optical time domain reflectometer traces collected over the wavelength range of interest. To calculate the distributed CD of the fiber, several approximations are required. The validity of these approximations is verified via a numerical simulation for both step-index and dispersion-shifted fibers (DSFs). These simulations allow the placement of an upper bound on the error of the measurement. Experimentally, measurements of both step-index and DSFs are reported.