Performance Breakthrough in Distributed Fiber Sensing by Digital Signal Processing of Optical Signal Amplitude and Phase

基于光纤的传感器是敏感且坚固的设备，其对恶劣的外部环境波动（例如，温度、电磁干扰、辐射等）具有弹性。并且很好地用作基础设施中的分布式传感介质。通常用于高端校准和制造过程的控制，它们的典型部署涉及庞大的频谱分析仪（电或光），和昂贵的可调谐激光sources.The拟议的研究将通过应用检测方案和信号处理技术，已经彻底改变了有线和无线技术中的数字通信来解决这些挑战。信息将被编码在光信号的振幅和相位中，以增加其对周围环境变化的敏感性，同时消除收发器处对额外硬件的需求。由于环境条件的变化相对缓慢（kHz）相比，一个典型的无线（MHz）/有线（GHz）信道的带宽要求，相应成熟的半导体集成电路（高速电子）最初打算用于数字通信提供了巨大的计算能力，在极低的成本。多余的计算带宽可用于通过通信和成像中常见的成熟数字信号处理（DSP）技术来补偿设备伪影。这将在分布式光纤传感器的性能和复杂性降低方面提供数量级的改进。

Optical fiber based sensors are sensitive and robust devices that are resilient to harsh external environment fluctuations (e.g. temperature, electromagnetic interference, radiation etc.) and serve well as a distributed sensing medium in infrastructure. Often used for high end calibration and control of manufacturing processes, their typical deployment involves bulky spectrum analyzers (electrical or optical), and costly tunable laser sources.The proposed research will address these challenges by applying detection schemes and signal processing techniques that have revolutionized digital communications in both wireline and wireless technologies. Information will be encoded in both the amplitude and phase of the optical signal to increase its sensitivity to the changing ambient environment, while removing the need for additional hardware at the transceivers. Estimation and calibration strategies will be developed to compensate for optical device fabrication defects and variations.As the environmental conditions vary relatively slowly (kHz) compared to the bandwidth requirement of a typical wireless (MHz)/ wireline (GHz) channel, the correspondingly matured semiconductor integrated circuit (highspeed electronic) originally intended for digital communications provides dramatic computation power at an extremely low cost. The excess computing bandwidth can be used to compensate for device artefacts via mature digital signal processing (DSP) technique common in communication and imaging. This will deliver orders of magnitude improvement in the performance and complexity reduction in distributed optical fiber sensors.