Hybrid wavelength-division-multiplexing/spectral-amplitude-coding optical CDMA system

One spectral-amplitude-coding (SAC) scheme combined with wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) is proposed for optical code-division multiple-access systems. The supported code length is more flexible than the previous SAC codes and the corresponding encoder-decoder requires less fiber gratings, thus, the system becomes cheap and simple. As compared to the conventional SAC systems, this WDM/SAC system not only reserves the interference-cancellation property, but also has better performance against the effect of the phase-induced intensity noise arising in the photodetecting process. Thus, a larger number of active users can be supported under a given bit-error rate.