Enhanced fault characterization by using a conventional OTDR and DSP techniques.

To plan a rapid response and minimize operational costs, passive optical network operators require to automatically detect and identify faults that may occur in the optical distribution network. In this work, we present DSP-Enhanced OTDR, a novel methodology for remote fault analysis based on conventional optical time-domain reflectometry complemented with reference traces and DSP-based techniques. We first obtain the optimal decision thresholds to detect deviations in the noisy OTDR measurement.