Reconfigurable Software-Defined Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer for Diagnostics and Sensing

Systems and methods are provided for a software defined optical time-domain reflectometer (SD-OTDR) using high-speed optical transceiver modules. Enabled by the reconfigurable computing resource, an SD-OTDR in accordance with an embodiment of the present disclosure can realize in-situ diagnostics of optical fiber without adding any overhead to existing systems. In addition, an SD-OTDR in accordance with an embodiment of the present disclosure can also be used for high-resolution distributed sensing. Additionally, an SD-OTDR in accordance with an embodiment of the present disclosure can directly map optical reflections at different locations along the length of a fiber to a processing element array in a Field-Programmable Gate Array for real-time in-sensor parallel data processing.