Optical fiber code-division multiple-access networks using concatenated codes

An optical fiber code-division multiple-access (CDMA) network is proposed in which encoding is based on the use of concatenated sequences of relatively large weight. The first short component sequence in the concatenated sequence permits realistic electronic encoding of each data bit. The chips of this sequence are then all-optically encoded at substantially higher rate. In spite of the relatively large weight of the sequence the all-optical encoder is practical by virtue of the shortness of the component sequences. The use of Gold and Lempel sequences as component sequences for generating the concatenated sequences is studied and the bit-error rate (BER) performance of the proposed system is presented as a function of the received optical power with the number of simultaneous users as parameter.