Long-range accelerated BOTDA sensor using adaptive linear prediction and cyclic coding.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a long-range accelerated Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) sensor that exploits the complementary noise reduction benefits of adaptive linear prediction and optical pulse coding. The combined technique allows using orders of magnitude less the number of averages of the back-scattered BOTDA traces compared to a standard single pulse BOTDA, enabling distributed strain measurement over 10 km of a standard single mode fiber with meter-scale spatial resolution and 1.8 MHz Brillouin frequency shift resolution. By optimizing the system parameters, the measurement is achieved with only 20 averages for each Brillouin gain spectrum scanned frequency, allowing for an eight times faster strain measurement compared to the use of cyclic pulse coding alone. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America