Complexities, error probabilities, and capacities of optical OOK-CDMA communication systems

The complexity in the hardware implementation of traditional optical code-division multiple-access correlation receivers with double optical hardlimiters is discussed. A comparison with the implementation of chip-level receivers is presented as well. In addition, the bit error probabilities and the throughput capacities for both chip-level and correlation systems (without hardlimiters) are derived and evaluated under code-correlation constraints equal to one and two. Our results reveal that chip-level receivers are much simpler and their performances are competitive with that of traditional correlation receivers with double optical hardlimiters. Further, the throughput capacity of chip-level systems can be increased by almost a factor of 3.4 when increasing the code-correlation constraint from one to two.