Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying Modulation With Random Coding Pulse for Long-Range ϕ-OTDR

Transient effect in erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) restricts the application of the phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (ϕ-OTDR) system with coding probe pulse (CPP) in long-distance vibration sensing. In this paper, a CPP modulation scheme based on phase coding is proposed to suppress the amplitude distortion after optical amplification. Quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), which has a high spectrum utilization efficiency, is designed on a I/Q modulator. The random sequence CPP is used in this system, because of the single coding sequence, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved without loss of the sensing bandwidth. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the scheme. Compared to the conventional modulation scheme at a 50 mW pump power, the distortion coefficient of the CPP after amplification decreases from 57.67% to 9.23%, and the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) increases from 13.89 dB to 16.67 dB. Without distributed amplification, the proposed system successfully located the vibration at 85.652 km under the carrier period of 40 ns, and the SNR of the demodulated signal is up to 21.99 dB.