Distributed fiber sparse-wideband vibration sensing by sub-Nyquist additive random sampling

The round-trip time of the light pulse limits the maximum detectable vibration frequency response range of phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (phi-OTDR). Unlike the uniform laser pulse interval in conventional phi-OTDR, we randomly modulate the pulse interval so that an equivalent sub-Nyquist additive random sampling (sNARS) is realized for every sensing point of the long interrogation fiber. For a phi-OTDR system with 10 km sensing length, the sNARS method is optimized by theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulation, and the experimental results verify that a wideband sparse signal can be identified and reconstructed. Such a method can broaden the vibration frequency response range of phi-OTDR, which is of great significance in sparse-wideband-frequency vibration signal detection. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America.