Comparison of diverse optical CDMA codes using a normalized throughput metric

A new method of comparing optical CDMA codes of different families, sizes and weights is described. We outline why the traditional performance metric of bit-error rate versus number of simultaneous users is lacking and propose a new performance measure - the peak throughput normalized with respect to the size of the code. This new metric is used to show that optical-orthogonal codes (OOCs) with a weight of 4 perform best at low offered loads while OOCs with weight 5 should be used at higher offered loads. By applying the technique across different families of codes, we demonstrate that multi-wavelength OOCs (MWOOCs) perform better than both OOCs (by a factor of approximately 1.25) and asymmetric prime-hop codes (by a factor of approximately 3.5), over a wide range of offered loads.