Spatial Nonlocality from Finite Extinction Ratio in BOTDR over Heterogeneous Fiber Links
Abstract
Finite extinction ratio in pulse-modulated Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (BOTDR) produces residual inter-pulse Brillouin backscatter outside the nominal pulse gate. We model and experimentally quantify this effect as spatial nonlocality in a heterogeneous fiber link and define the spectral contamination ratio (SCR) as the contaminating Brillouin-band power normalized to the local Brillouin-band power. Measurements were performed using a 1.2 km standard single-mode fiber (SMF) followed by 0.1 km of dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF), whose separated Brillouin frequency shifts allow section-to-section leakage to be resolved spectrally. At 20 m spatial resolution, increasing the extinction ratio from 18.5 to 33.0 dB reduced the SMF-band contamination in the DCF gates from -5.3 to -14.8 dB. Over the 16-33 dB range, the SCR showed fitted slopes of -1.064 and -1.246 dB/dB for the two contamination directions. These results quantify finite-ER-induced spatial nonlocality and provide a link-specific metric for extinction-ratio selection in BOTDR.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{poulopoulos2026spatial,
title = {{Spatial Nonlocality from Finite Extinction Ratio in BOTDR over Heterogeneous Fiber Links}},
author = {Giannis Poulopoulos and Constantinos Haliotis and Panagiotis Toumasis and Hercules Avramopoulos},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.14128},
eprint = {2610.14128},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14128},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Spatial Nonlocality from Finite Extinction Ratio in BOTDR over Heterogeneous Fiber Links
AU - Giannis Poulopoulos
AU - Constantinos Haliotis
AU - Panagiotis Toumasis
AU - Hercules Avramopoulos
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.14128
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14128
AB - Finite extinction ratio in pulse-modulated Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry (BOTDR) produces residual inter-pulse Brillouin backscatter outside the nominal pulse gate. We model and experimentally quantify this effect as spatial nonlocality in a heterogeneous fiber link and define the spectral contamination ratio (SCR) as the contaminating Brillouin-band power normalized to the local Brillouin-band power. Measurements were performed using a 1.2 km standard single-mode fiber (SMF) followed by 0.1 km of dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF), whose separated Brillouin frequency shifts allow section-to-section leakage to be resolved spectrally. At 20 m spatial resolution, increasing the extinction ratio from 18.5 to 33.0 dB reduced the SMF-band contamination in the DCF gates from -5.3 to -14.8 dB. Over the 16-33 dB range, the SCR showed fitted slopes of -1.064 and -1.246 dB/dB for the two contamination directions. These results quantify finite-ER-induced spatial nonlocality and provide a link-specific metric for extinction-ratio selection in BOTDR.
ER -