Trench-assisted multimode fiber used in Brillouin optical time domain sensors

The trench-assisted multimode fiber TA-OM4 is used as a sensing fiber to achieve a higher signal-to-noise (SNR) in Brillouin optical time domain sensors, due to its high stimulated Brillouin threshold and high modulation instability threshold. The Brillouin gain spectrum (BGS), stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and modulation instability (MI) thresholds of TA-OM4 at 1550 nm are characterized and demonstrated theoretically and experimentally. The SNR improvements of TA-OM4 over G655 and G657 at the end of 15.5 km-long fibers, which are respectively 1.1 dB and 2.3 dB are verified experimentally. We achieve a temperature uncertainty of 0.3°C in 15.5 km TA-OM4 with 5 m spatial resolution by use of a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry (BOTDR) sensor. The good bend resistance and high SBS and MI thresholds of TA-OM4 with better SNR improvements over SMFs works at the extreme bending conditions.