Jian Fang is a Senior Researcher in the Optical Networking and Sensing Department at NEC Laboratories America. He received his B.S. in Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering and his M.S. in Information and Communication Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Melbourne. His research interests include distributed optical fiber sensing, specialty fibers and hybrid sensing systems, optical signal processing, and photonic sensing for industrial and environmental applications. At NEC, he develops advanced sensing systems that leverage coherent backscatter to detect vibration and intrusion across long-distance fiber links. His work underpins NEC’s innovations in passive infrastructure monitoring for security, seismic awareness, and smart mobility. Dr. Fang’s integration of novel signal processing techniques with real-world constraints has made him a key contributor to NEC’s next-generation sensing portfolio.
We demonstrate, for the first time, that cyclic linear pulse coding can be bipolar for BOTDA sensors, breaking the unipolar limitation of linear coding techniques and elevating the coding gain for a given code length.
We propose a novel multi-parameter sensing technique based on a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry in the elliptical-core few-mode fiber, using higher-order optical and acoustic modes. Multiple Brillouin peaks are observed for the backscattering of both the LP01 mode and LP11 mode. We characterize the temperature and strain coefficients for various opticalacoustic mode pairs. By selecting the proper combination of modes pairs, the performance of multi-parameter sensing can be optimized. Distributed sensing of temperature and strain is demonstrated over a 0.5-km elliptical-core few-mode fiber, with the discriminative uncertainty of 0.28°C and 5.81 ?? for temperature and strain, respectively.
We propose a single-ended Brillouin-based sensor in elliptical-core few-mode optical fiber for multi-parameter measurement using spontaneous Brillouin scattering. Distributed sensing of temperature and strain is demonstrated over 0.5 km elliptical-core few-mode fiber.
