Recent progress in Brillouin distributed fibre sensing

This paper will review some recent progresses related to distributed optical fibre sensing using Brillouin Optical Time-Domain Analysis (BOTDA) towards increased performance in range, resolution and acquisition time. Since optical fibre sensing will certainly be a decisive tool for securing dangerous installations and detecting environmental and industrial threats, the comparison of the different techniques and solutions remains however difficult because of the lack of standardized specifications and the difficulty associated to the characterization of such systems. We here present tentative qualification procedures applicable to fiber optic distributed sensing systems.