《Long-Range Coherent OFDR With Light Source》.pdf

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 30, NO. 8, APRIL 15, 2012 1015 Long-Range Coherent OFDR With Light Source Phase Noise Compensation Fumihiko Ito, Member, IEEE, Xinyu Fan, Member, IEEE, and Yusuke Koshikiya (Invited Paper) Abstract— Recent progress on novel long-range coherent optical OTDR there is a trade-off between spatial resolution and sen- frequency domain reflectometry is reviewed along with its appli- sitivity. Typically, OTDR realizes a meter level spatial resolu- cations to diagnosing problems with optical fiber cables. The mea- tion over several tens of kilometers. OTDR is widely used for surement range of a conventional C-OFDR is limited to the coher- ence length of the laser used as the light source, since the phase diagnosing fiber networks because of its long range and mod- noise of the laser degrades the sharpness of the beat spectrum. erate resolution. We have developed phase-noise-compensated optical frequency do- In contrast, C-OFDR is a frequency domain technology that main reflectometry (PNC-OFDR) to overcome this limitation by uses a continuous probe beam whose frequency is linearly introducing a novel phase-noise compensation technique, and we swept. The back-reflected beam from an FUT is detected by a achieved a very high-resolution measurement over the fiber link length. We describe the principle of PNC-OFDR and recent re- coherent receiver where the original linearly frequency-swept lated developments, and discuss its use in diagnosing issues with probe is used as a local beam. Since the reflected beam at a fiber networks.