Novel Technique to Improve Spatial Resolution in Brillouin Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry

A novel Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (BOTDR) system, called a double-pulse BOTDR (DP-BOTDR) system, is proposed for measuring distributed strain and temperature in a fiber with a sub-meter spatial resolution. Our experiment confirmed that the DP-BOTDR system enables us to measure the distributed Brillouin frequency shift, i.e., the distributed strain and temperature, with a spatial resolution of 20 cm. This spatial resolution is five times better than that provided by the conventional single-pulse BOTDR system.