Advances in optical fiber technology and sensor interrogator design point to a new generation of optical fiber sensors for distributed applications. Critical developments include the commercialization of practical and very sensitive, phase sensitive interrogation methods that can be applied to distributed measurements in optical fibers. These include phase sensitive optical time domain reflectometry and optical frequency domain reflectometry. Just as important is a new generation of enhanced optical fibers that greatly increase signal to noise and include features such as multiple helically twisted cores and low attenuation fiber with scattering enhancements over lengths in excess of 1 kilometer. Such fibers can enable high speed, highly accurate measurements of fiber strain, temperature, bend, and even shape over meters of fiber, as well as sensitive acoustic measurements over kilometers of fiber. This new generation of distributed fiber sensors represents a new information stream from systems fiber networks and industrial and medical settings that use optical fiber. At the same time, machine learning and other techniques from data science are beginning to have impact in on photonics applications. The application of these methods in distributed sensing is wide open field that promises significant new impacts in applications from smart cities to the Internet of things IoT.

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