Fast Frame Synchronization Design and FPGA Implementation in SF-BOTDA

To address the issues of high time consumption of frame synchronization involved in a scanning-free Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (SF-BOTDA) system, a fast frame synchronization algorithm based on incremental updating was proposed. In comparison to the standard frame synchronization algorithm, the proposed one significantly reduced the processing time required for the BOTDA system frame synchronization by about 98%. In addition, to further accelerate the real-time performance of frame synchronization, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware implementation architecture based on parallel processing and pipelining mechanisms was also proposed. Compared with the software implementation, it further raised the processing speed by 13.41 times. The proposed approach could lay a foundation for the BOTDA system in the field with the associated high real-time requirements.