Performance comparison of multiwavelength CDMA and WDMA+CDMA for fiber-optic networks

A "multiwavelength" scheme has been proposed to support large numbers of subscribers and simultaneous users in optical code-division multiple-access (CDMA) networks without using very large bandwidth expansion or the need of complicated and not-yet-feasible optical processing. In this paper, multiwavelength optical orthogonal codes (MWOOCs), which consist of two-dimensional codewords (or matrices) with every pulse of a codeword encoded in a distinct wavelength, are constructed for this scheme. MWOOCs have larger cardinality than the one-dimensional codes used in the hybrid wavelength-division multiple-access (WDMA) and CDMA scheme. With the same hardware configuration, our analysis shows that the multiwavelength scheme, in general, performs better than the hybrid scheme, particularly when the traffic load is heavy. However, if a central controller (i.e., under the best scenario) is used to uniformly distribute all available wavelengths to simultaneous users in the hybrid scheme, both schemes have comparable performance for a medium traffic load and the hybrid scheme can theoretically achieve error-free transmission when the load is light. In addition, using multiple wavelengths, the requirements of fiber ribbons and multiple stars in temporal/spatial optical CDMA networks are eliminated.