Low-rate super-orthogonal channel coding for fiber-optic CDMA communication systems

In this paper, we consider using practical low-rate error correcting codes in fiber-optic code division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems. To this end, a different method of low-rate channel coding is proposed. As opposed to the conventional coding schemes, this method does not require any further bandwidth expansion for error correction in fiber-optic CDMA communication systems. The low-rate channel codes that are used for demonstrating the capabilities of the proposed method are super-orthogonal codes. These codes are near optimal and have a relatively low complexity. We evaluate the upper bounds on the bit-error probability of the proposed coded fiber-optic CDMA system assuming both on-off keying and binary pulse position modulation schemes. It is shown that the proposed method significantly outperforms the uncoded systems for various receiver structures such as a correlator with and without hard-limiter and chip-level detector. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed coded fiber-optic CDMA system is also evaluated in the presence of different values of dark current