Polarization dependence of phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry and its suppression method based on orthogonal-state of polarization pulse pair

Abstract

Phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) has been widely used in various applications for its distributed measurement capability of dynamic disturbance along the entire sensing fiber. Commonly, the sensing system is considered to be only sensitive to the phase change and capable of detecting multiple vibration events. In application, once any of the vibration events leads to a local birefringence change, the polarization evolution of the signal will be disturbed along the following fiber, which will result in the generation of polarization-related noise and the failure of identification for multipoint vibration events. We will reveal the polarization-dependence of Φ-OTDR both theoretically and experimentally. To suppress the polarization-dependence of Φ-OTDR, an orthogonal-state of polarization pulse pair method has been proposed, making the sensing system purely phase-sensitive. The experiment result has shown that maximum noise suppression ratio of 11.2 dB and mean noise suppression ratio of 4.9 dB could be achieved, which confirmed the validity of the proposed method.