Continuous QPSK-OFDM for integrated optical communication and distributed acoustic sensing
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Updated: Nov 1, 2026
Quasi-light Storage for Optical Data Packets
Published on: February 6, 2014
Xi Chen1,2, Maoqi Liu1, Yichang Wu1,2,3,4
1Photonics Research Institute, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Abstract:
Optical fibers can carry data while also supporting sensing based on Rayleigh backscatter. A single continuous quadrature phase-shift keying orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (QPSK-OFDM) waveform supports communication and distributed acoustic sensing without sensing bursts, zero padding, or separate wavelength or time resources, but the cyclic prefix (CP) duration must exceed the fiber round-trip delay. For backscatter sensing, polarization combining and subband combining suppress polarization fading and Rayleigh fading, respectively. Over 5.9 km, the system achieves a 2.50 m spatial resolution, a 7.915 kHz sensing sampling rate, and a 69.4 pε/√(Hz) noise floor. Forward transmission at 208.95 Mb/s yields no observed bit errors and a root mean square error vector magnitude (RMS EVM) of -27.00 dB.
