Enhancing the performance of BOTDR based on the combination of FFT technique and complementary coding.

We implement a BOTDR sensor that combines the complementary coding with the fast Fourier transform (FFT) technique for high-performance distributed sensing. The employment of the complementary coding provides an enhanced signal-to-noise ratio of the sensing system, which leads to high accuracy measurement. Meanwhile, FFT technique in BOTDR is combined to reduce the measurement time sharply compared to the classical frequency sweeping technique. In addition, a pre-depletion two-wavelength probe pulse is proposed to suppress the distortion of the coding probe pulse induced by EDFA. Experiments are carried out beyond 10 km single-mode fiber, and the results show the capabilities of the proposed scheme to achieve 2 m spatial resolution with 0.37 MHz frequency uncertainty which corresponds to ∼0.37 °C temperature resolution or ∼7.4 με strain resolution. The measurement time can be more than tens of times faster than traditional frequency sweeping method in theory.