Frequency Resolution Quantification of Brillouin-Distributed Optical Fiber Sensors

Noise analysis using Monte Carlo method is conducted in this letter to correct the relationship between the frequency resolution, the Q-factor, signal-to-noise ratio, and frequency step in the Brillouin-distributed optical fibre sensors. The quantification of the Brillouin gain spectrum is important in distributed Brillouin sensors in order to improve the Brillouin frequency resolution and the corresponding strain and temperature resolutions. Two analytical expressions are derived in order to estimate the error in the determination of the Brillouin central frequency with or without second-order polynomial fitting.