Fault Detection Sensitivity Enhancement Based On High-Order Spatial Mode Trend Filtering For Few-Mode Fiber Link

In this paper, we propose and experimentally verify a method for optimizing the fault detection sensitivity of few mode fiber (FMF) link based on high-order spatial mode trend filtering. The employment of high-order mode trend filtering as a signal processing tool identifies meaningful level shifts from FMF optical time-domain reflectometer (FMF-OTDR) profile, which is associated with the problem of the minimization of the intrinsic random noise and modal crosstalk impact on the acquired data. A FMF link fault detection system is built, and the proposed method is utilized to detect the fault loss characteristics of 7.2 km 6-mode fiber with three fusion splice points with different fusion quality, and the detection results of each mode are compared with the results obtained by FMF-OTDR. The experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively improve the low fault detection sensitivity of high-order spatial mode caused by random noise and mode crosstalk. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement