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With the development of networking technology and optical fiber sensor network technology, the use of optical fiber system to construct a large-scale, long distance optical fiber sensing network has become a hotspot of research. Optimizing the system to reach very long sensing ranges actually requires launching high pump and probe powers into the sensing fiber to provide a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the measurements at the far end of the fiber. However, increasing the input power above a critical level excites undesired nonlinear effects such as the modulation instability (MI) and the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), which deplete the pump and reduce the maximum sensing range of the system. Compared to SRS, MI shows a lower critical power and thus determines the maximum sensing range of a fiber sensor, so MI becomes the most important factor to limit the sensing range. In order to understand the MI in the system with the DFRA, we design a lot of experiments to test which factors will affect it in the system with distributed fiber Raman amplifier (DFRA) in this paper. From the threshold expression of MI and a lot of experiments, we found that the input power, the state of polarization, the phase and so on, have a significant impact on the system. According to the result of the experiments, we can find the Raman gain affects the MI and find some useful information for suppressing the MI in the later.
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