Fading statistics in Rayleigh interferometric fiber sensors

Distributed, interferometric, fiber optic sensors based on Rayleigh scattering suffer from random signal level variation (Rayleigh fading). This speckle-like phenomenon is due to the large number of scatterers. Knowledge of the statistical distribution of fading is important to estimate system performance, the likelihood of fading, and to devise strategies to mitigate fading. The distribution has been variously thought to be an exponential or Rayleigh distribution. Modeling shows the fading for the common interrogation schemes that do not use a fixed reference path to