Testing Time and Frequency Fiber-Optic Link Transfer by Hardware Emulation of Acoustic-Band Optical Noise

The low-frequency optical-signal phase noise induced by mechanical vibration of the base occurs in field-deployed fibers. Typical telecommunication data transfer is insensitive to this type of noise but the phenomenon may influence links dedicated to precise Time and Frequency (T&F) fiber-optic transfer that exploit the idea of stabilization of phase or propagation delay of the link. To measure effectiveness of suppression of acoustic noise in such a link, a dedicated measurement setup is necessary. The setup should enable to introduce a low-frequency phase corruption to the optical signal in a controllable way. In the paper, a concept of a setup in which the mechanically induced acoustic-band optical signal phase corruption is described and its own features and measured parameters are presented. Next, the experimental measurement results of the T&F transfer TFTS-2 system’s immunity as a function of the fibre-optic length vs. the acoustic-band noise are presented. Then, the dependency of the system immunity on the location of a noise source along the link is also pointed out.