Investigation of error of optical fiber loss measurement on fiber optic link

This paper demonstrates feature considerations of fiber optic data transmission systems, which is the main reason of importance increase of measurement assurance for fiber optic link parameter estimation and improvement of both accuracy and reliability of the obtained results. The features of the back-scattering time-domain method application were considered. As a result, we proved a necessity of taking into account the influence of trace noise on the error of attenuation measurement both for the whole fiber optic link and its particular fragments. We researched the errors of measurement of attenuation coefficient and optical fiber splice loss depending on the optical signal-to-noise ratio and quasi regular span length. Some results of experimental researches are presented. They provide to educe correctly a degradation of fiber optic link parameters at the beginning and to couch the requirements for conditions of measurements by the back-scattering method.