Impact of optical noises on unipolar-coded Brillouin optical time-domain analyzers

Noise models for both single-pulse and coded Brillouin optical time-domain analyzers (BOTDA) are established to quantify the actual signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement provided by pulse coding at any fiber position and in any operating condition. Simulation and experimental results show that the polarization noise and spontaneous Brillouin scattering (SpBS) to signal beating noise could highly penalize the performance of coded-BOTDA, depending on the code type and the interrogated fiber position. The models also serve as a useful tool to optimize the SNR improvement by trading off the accumulated Brillouin gain and optical noises.