Optical fiber sensing has the advantages of immunity to electromagnetic interference

resistance to corrosion

light weight

small size

high resolution

and easy multiplexing

which has been widely used for various sensing applications

such as aerospace

petrochemical

electronic power

civil engineering

and biomedicine.The conventional interrogation schemes suffer from the problems of low resolution

low rate

and poor stability.To solve these problems

microwave photonics based sensing and interrogation technique has attracted extensive attention of the researchers.In this paper

a comprehensive and systematic overview of optical fiber sensing interrogation techniques based on microwave photonics is presented.Several microwave photonics based interrogation schemes and the corresponding operation principles are introduced

and the future development direction are also discussed.