Acceleration of the frequency-shift demodulation in phase-sensitive OTDR

Abstract The frequency-shift demodulation is a primary demodulation method in phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) with intrinsic resistance to interference fading. So far, the least mean squares (LMS) estimation method has the optimal demodulation accuracy and robustness. However, it takes much processing time due to the step-by-step sliding operation. In this work, we propose a fast LMS estimation method based on cross-correlation calculation to accelerate the demodulation while maintaining accuracy. Experiments are performed along a 9 km sensing fiber with a 4 m spatial resolution. The performance of the fast LMS, LMS, and cross-correlation methods are compared by using the same parameters. Compared with the LMS method, the fast LMS achieves a 12-time improvement in processing speed while remaining the same demodulation accuracy. Although the proposed fast LMS method takes slightly more time than the cross-correlation method (1.6 times), it improves the demodulation accuracy ∼6 dB for the vibration signal and ∼2.1 dB for the overall demodulation accuracy.