Optical CDMA via temporal codes

The authors provide an analysis of the performance of optical orthogonal codes in an optical code division multiple access (CDMA) network by considering the probability distribution of the interference patterns. It is shown that the actual performance is close to a previous estimate. A less structured temporal code in which the code words are allowed to overlap at two pulse positions is also considered. The bit error probability for this class of codes is obtained for two cases: with and without optical hard-limiting at the receivers. It is shown that this code may increase the number of users in the network considerably without a significant loss in the performance