FPGA-Based Implementation of a Novel Method for Estimating the Brillouin Frequency Shift in BOTDA and BOTDR Sensors

In recent years, due to the rapid developments of the technology, distributed optical fiber sensors based on Brillouin scattering have become widely popular. Despite their major role in modern monitoring systems, there have been a few works about the challenges of data acquisition and data analysis in such systems. These sensors have a sensing distance of tens of kilometers, which result in a massive amount of raw data. To process this amount of data, millions of operations are needed, which can be quite challenging in an online monitoring system. In this paper, we propose a hardware architecture for analysis of acquired data from the optical part of these sensors. Our main focus is on the performance and utilization of field programmable gate array resources. We also propose a novel estimator based on moving average and cross correlation, which improves the performance of the estimation process more than 95% in comparison with the state-of-the-art software and hardware solutions.