Brillouin frequency shift extraction by bidirectional integration of Brillouin gain spectrum

A novel Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) extraction approach based on bidirectional integration is proposed and investigated for mitigating the fluctuations in Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR) system. The proposed method involves calculating the BFS through the forward and backward integrations of the original Brillouin gain spectrum (BGS) data. The findings from both simulations and experiments demonstrate that bidirectional integration achieves superior BFS accuracy compared to Lorentzian curve fitting. To further evaluate its performance, the root mean square error of BFS is measured under the different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and frequency steps and the results show that bidirectional integration has higher tolerance for low SNR. Specifically, bidirectional integration achieves a BFS accuracy of 0.853 MHz under SNR of 5.22 dB and significantly reduces the measurement time by 85.86 %. Additionally, the introduced coefficient k characterizes the influence on the BGS compression, with bidirectional integration exhibiting a narrower full width at half maximum of BGS (52.74 MHz) compared to Lorentzian curve fitting (67.45 MHz).