Design and Development of a Fiber Break Monitoring System in Optical Fiber Communications

Fiber optic cable has been used widely in network communications system.It has being a favorable choice since it offers many advantages,such as immunity to electrical interference, lightening, high bandwidth and security. Due to the massive deployment of optical fiber cable, networks based on this medium needs significantly good monitoring and protection scheme to ensure its availability, especially for critical networks.Current approach uses a system known as Remote Fiber Testing System (RFTS) or Remote Fiber Monitoring System (RFMS).RFMS allows an operator to remotely monitor the condition of a fiber cable by using Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). The requirements to place OTDR permanently for continuous monitoring force the line owners to place a high investment to the system.Moreover, placing OTDR is overkill since most of the faults in the fiber optic cable are due to the fiber break.This thesis presents a new approach of monitoring and detecting fiber break by using a simpler device, significantly less expensive yet gives an appropriate measurement to the distance break in place of the OTDR–based RFMS. The design and development of the system, namely Fiber Break Monitoring System (FBMS) will continuously monitor the optical signals in the live fiber cable. The device automatically measures the distance when it detects the break. The distance is measured by analyzing the propagation time of the Fresnel reflection, occurred at the end of the surface break to be detected by the detector module inside FBMS. The study is carried out in both simulation and experiment. The typical performances for analyzing the performance of FBMS are the length resolution, event deadzone, sampling resolution, accuracy, dynamic range and pulsewidth. Those performances were compared to the typical OTDR. This study has proved that FBMS is practicable for a real time monitoring, detecting a fiber break and giving an acceptable result to the distance measured

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