Enhanced response in Brillouin distributed optical fibre sensors by simultaneous time and frequency pump multiplexing

A technique to enhance the response of Brillouin distributed sensors is proposed and experimentally validated. The method consists in creating a multi-frequency pump pulse interacting with a multi-frequency continuous-wave probe. The power of each pulse at a distinct frequency is lower than the threshold for nonlinear effects, while the sensor response remains given by the total power of all pulses. Distinct frequency pulses are delayed to avoid temporal overlapping and cross-interaction; this requires to smartly reconstruct the traces before photo-detection. The method is validated in a 50 km-long sensor using 3 frequencies, demonstrating a signal-to-noise ratio enhancement of 4.8 dB.