Transmission of High Power Sensor System and DWDM Data System in One Optical Fiber

This article deals with the possibility of employing phase sensitive OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflectometry) into fibers with active data transmission DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplex). Due to the low backscattered signal of phase sensitive OTDR is required to generate pulses with a high intensity and short time duration. These high power pulses can cause degradation of the data transmission. By using VPIphotonics software we performed the simulations investigating the influence of phase sensitive OTDR for quality DWDM connections and we are also interested in the wavelength spacing between sensoric system and data system. In our article it was verified that phase sensitive OTDR and data transmission can be active together in one optical fiber. If both systems work very close to each other it will lead to degradation of data transmission. We have verified that data transmission may be affected if power of pulses exceed 13 dBm.