title: Compensation of laser frequency tuning nonlinearity of a long range OFDR using deskew filter.
abstract: We present a simple and effective method to compensate the optical frequency tuning nonlinearity of a tunable laser source (TLS) in a long range optical frequency-domain reflectometry (OFDR) by using the deskew filter, where a frequency tuning nonlinear phase obtained from an auxiliary interferometer is used to compensate the nonlinearity effect on the beating signals generated from a main OFDR interferometer. The method can be applied to the entire spatial domain of the OFDR signals at once with a high computational efficiency. With our proposed method we experimentally demonstrated a factor of 93 times improvement in spatial resolution by comparing the results of an OFDR system with and without nonlinearity compensation. In particular we achieved a measurement range of 80 km and a spatial resolution of 20 cm and 1.6 m at distances of 10 km and 80 km, respectively with a short signal processing time of less than 1 s for 5 × 10(6) data points. The improved performance of the OFDR with a high spatial resolution, a long measurement range and a short process time will lead to practical applications in the real-time monitoring, test and measurement of fiber optical communication networks and sensing systems.
authors.affiliation: College of Precision Instrument and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China.
authors.forename: Zhenyang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.forename: X Steve
authors.initials: XS
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.forename: Tiegen
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Du
authors.forename: Kun
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Junfeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Zhuo
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.forename: Hongxin
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D005374:Filtration / Q000295:instrumentation*; D007834:Lasers; D008027:Light; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D010783:Photometry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012542:Scattering, Radiation