Rejection of interlabel crosstalk in a digital lightpath labeling system with low-cost all-wavelength receivers

Theoretical and experimental results on the code design and bit error rate (BER) performance of a digitally encoded lightpath labeling system for multiwavelength photonic networks are reported. For low cost, the shared label receivers operate without wavelength filters, relying on electrical code-division multiple access (CDMA) techniques to resolve the labels from various wavelengths. Code designs capable of operating in noise-limited networks with up to 80 wavelengths are presented, and the tradeoff between complexity and coding overhead is explored. Multiwavelength laboratory experiments show a good agreement with theory. The BER performance of a decorrelating decoder is shown to exceed that of a conventional decoder for systems with large wavelength counts