Passive Optical Fast Frequency-Hop CDMA Communications System

This paper proposes an all-fiber fast optical frequency-hop code division multiple access (FFH-CDMA) for high-bandwidth communications. The system does not require an optical frequency synthesizer, allowing high communication bit rates. Encoding and decoding are passively achieved by strain-tunable fiber Bragg gratings. Multiple Bragg gratings replace a frequency synthesizer, achieving a hopping rate in tens of GHz. A main lobe sinc apodization can be used in writing the gratings to enhance the system capacity and the spectrum efficiency. All network users can use the same tunable encoder/decoder design. The simultaneous utilization of the time and frequency domains offers notable flexibility in code selection. Simulations show that the encoder efficiently performs the FFH spread spectrum signal generation and that the receiver easily extracts the desired signal from a received signal for several multiple access interference scenarios. We measure the system performance in terms of bit error rate, as well as auto-to cross-correlation contrast. A transmission rate of 500 Mb/s per user is supported in a system with up to 30 simultaneous users at 10^-9 bit error rate. We compare FFH-CDMA to several direct sequence-CDMA systems in terms of bit error rate versus the number of simultaneous users. We show that an optical FFH-CDMA system requires new design criteria for code families, as optical device technology differs significantly from that of radio frequency communications.