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Live-Fiber OTDR Testing: Traffic and Measurement Impairments

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Live-Fiber OTDR Testing: Traffic and Measurement Impairments

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  • Author: Dr. Hongxin Chen
Monitoring equipment for detecting and locating bends, material degradations or breaks in optical fiber networks is traditionally set up on dark fiber as this provides good balance between material cost, system provisioning effort and fault detection success rate. Most monitoring systems used for physical fault detection and positioning employ OTDRs; a dark-fiber monitoring approach typically uses a 1550 nm window test unit since this window produces lower fiber attenuation, maximizing the measurement range. Skipping over terminals, amplifiers and OADMs only requires optically connecting the appropriate ports and the next segment becomes visible for the OTDR, with almost no additional loss. It is also a well-known fact that monitoring only a few fibers within a cable geometry and structure (such at its outer part, one per tube or one per ribbon) is enough to provide information about the optical link quality.

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