Performance enhancement of raman optical time domain reflectometer using golay codes

We show the performance enhancement of a distributed temperature sensing system based on Raman scattering in optical fibers by using correlation codes. Specifically, we demonstrate experimentally that the use of Golay sequences provide an improvement in the signal to noise ratio by a factor of 10 dB, thereby providing an improvement in the temperature uncertainty by a factor of 2.5 over conventional technique. © 2011 SPIE.