A nonlinearity-compensation-free optical frequency domain reflectometry（OFDR） scheme is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on the electrically-controlled optical frequency sweep. In the proposed scheme, the linear frequency sweep light is generated by propagating an ultra-narrow-linewidth continuous-wave（CW） light through an electro-optic frequency shifter which consists of a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator（DPMZM） and an electronic 90° hybrid, where the electro-optic frequency shifter is driven by a linear frequency modulated signal generated by a direct digital synthesizer（DDS）. Experimental results show that the spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio（SNR） of the proposed OFDR scheme without the nonlinear phase compensation are comparable to those of OFDR employing a commercial tunable laser source（TLS）, an auxiliary interferometer,and a software-based nonlinear phase compensation method. The proposed OFDR scheme is helpful to reduce the complexity of the optical structure and eliminate the difficulty of developing the nonlinear phase compensation algorithm.
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