Atmospheric optical CDMA communication systems via optical orthogonal codes

We propose and consider using a class of multiple-access sequences, namely, optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) in atmospheric optical code-division multiple-access systems. We obtain analytical solutions to the error probability for various channel models using positive-intrinsic-negative diode and avalanche photodiode photodetectors. In our analysis, the effects of atmospheric turbulence, ambient light, thermal noise, and multiuser interference are considered, in the context of a semiclassical photon-counting approach. The performance of the systems taking advantage of space diversity and error-correcting codes are also evaluated. Two common and widely used optical modulations, on-off keying and pulse-position modulation, are considered. Receiver structures based on correlator and chip level are used for OOC detection. Unlike the traditional chip-level receiver, here a generalized form of chip-level structure with two threshold levels is considered. Upper and lower bounds on the error probability for the above-chip-level receiver structure is obtained. From our analytical results, we can deduce that the chip-level receiver outperforms a simple correlator in the absence or weak atmospheric fading; however, in a strong fading environment, the simple correlator outperforms the chip-level receiver