70 km long-range Raman distributed optical fibre sensing through enhanced anti-distortion coding and waveform reconstruction

Abstract

Abstract The practical implementation of Raman distributed optical fibre sensing has been fundamentally constrained by the inherent low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), particularly for sensing distance exceeding 30 km. We propose a paradigm that combines enhanced anti-distortion coding processing, advanced Raman scattering waveform reconstruction preprocessing, and Haar wavelet denoising to transcend this physical limitation. The proposed pre-processing framework simultaneously optimises complementary sequences correlation, effectively mitigates disturbances of transient effects and improves sensing performance. The experimental demonstration achieves performance metrics: 70.0 km sensing distance with 1.58 m spatial resolution, while maintaining 0.91 °C measurement accuracy and 5.39 °C temperature resolution. The tripartite synergistic mechanism, consisting of the waveform reconstruction pre-processing framework compensating for and suppressing transient effects, coding gain improving the baseline SNR, and the Haar wavelet transform removing residual noise, breaks through the theoretical trade-off constraint between SNR and sensing distance in traditional schemes. The proposed approach demonstrates a potential for application in the fields of long-range infrastructure monitoring and environmental sensing.