Optically orthogonal CDMA system performance with optical amplifier and photodetector noise

The effect of photodetector and erbium-doped fiber amplifier noise, together with coupler splitting and intrinsic losses, on the performance of an incoherent optical code-division multiple-access star network using optically orthogonal codes is studied using the bit-error probability as the performance metric. It is shown that the system performance is extremely sensitive to the parameter settings, such as amplifier gain and detector threshold that can have a much greater impact on system performance than the effect of the noise.