Fading-free Φ-OTDR evaluation based on the statistical analysis of phase hopping

In phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR), false phase peaks caused by interference fading have been observed experimentally; however, the statistical law has not yet been disclosed. In this work, after clarifying that the false phase peaks originate from the phase hopping of demodulated phase noise during the unwinding process, we define the phase hopping rate (PHR) to evaluate the degree of fading and study the quantitative relationship between the PHR and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the measured signal through theoretical derivation and experimental verification. In addition, a moving rotated-vector-average (MRVA) method is proposed to suppress the fading and eliminate the false phase peaks. In the experiment, after MRVA processing with a 25 ns sliding window, the lowest SNR is pulled from 0.003 to 14.9, and the corresponding PHR is reduced from 0.237 to less than 0.0001, which is consistent with the theoretical analysis.