Abstract: Forward stimulated Brillouin scattering (F-SBS), a 3-order nonlinear effect in optical fibers, has become the hotspot in recent years, due to its great potential in substance identification, and fiber diameter measurement, etc. Through research and analysis of the progress of F-SBS, the main principle and key techniques are generalized in this paper. Distributed sensing schemes based on local light phase recovery, opto-mechanical time-domain reflectometry, and opto-mechanical time-domain analysis are emphatically introduced here. With the gradual practical application of F-SBS, the demand for distributed measurement of F-SBS with high precision and high spatial resolution becomes more and more significant, which will be the main research direction of F-SBS in optical fibers in the future.