Construction of two-dimensional wavelength/time optical orthogonal codes using difference family

A new family of two-dimensional (2-D) wavelength/time optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) for asynchronous optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) systems is proposed. The construction scheme uses the difference family (DF), which is an assemblage of difference sets in the combinatorial theory. It is proven that the proposed codewords satisfy the correlation properties required for the asynchronous OCDMA systems. The code dimension of the proposed codes is more flexible than that of the conventional 2-D codewords. The performance of the system with the proposed codes is analyzed by using the Markov-chain method. Numerical results show that the bit error rate (BER) has a minimal value given the number of simultaneous users. It is also observed that the maximum number of simultaneous users of the system can be achieved by properly choosing both the code weight and cross correlation of the 2-D OOCs.