Towards the Design of a Distributed Fiber Optical Sensor for Mining Applications

We propose a fiber sensor that relies on linear optics for mining application. An optical fiber is used as a sensing element. In this work, we investigate the optical transmissions on an externally modulated fiber optic network. A 10 Gbps BPSK signal is transmitted over a non-zero dispersion shifted fiber (NZDSF). An error free transmission of up to 76 km on a Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM) source and 50 km on a Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) source respectively is achieved without amplification.