POWER MEASUREMENT OF NOISE-INITIATED BRILLOUIN-SCATTERING IN OPTICAL FIBERS FOR SENSING APPLICATIONS

We discuss the measurement of noise-initiated Brillouin scattered powe r in optical fibers and its application to distributed sensing systems . In particular, we consider the use of Brillouin scattering in the no nlinear regime, demonstrating a novel processing technique that compen sates for the nonlinear growth of the scattered signals. The signal-to -noise ratio performance of this technique is evaluated, highlighting the importance of the noise contributed by the random statistics of th e scattered field and yielding the conditions for optimum system opera tion. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.