Abstract
We studied the impact of optical pulse coding techniques on Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) systems experimentally. The results show that complementary-coding-based schemes can provide significant enhanced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the BOTDA system. Using complementary coding, the average time can be reduced significantly and so does the measurement time. The complementary-coded pulses with individual pulse duration of 0.1 ns allowed us to realize temperature sensing over 50 m of single-mode fiber with 1-cm spatial resolution.