Impact of beat noise on an incoherent OCDMA system with temporal spreading

An incoherent optical CDMA (OCDMA) system with temporal spreading that uses a light source with nonzero coherence time is studied in this paper. A model is established to simulate the incoherent combining of multiple light pulses at the receiver. System performances for different ratios of chip duration to coherence time are evaluated. Results show that the performance with a nonideal source is noticeably degraded from that of the ideal case due to beat noise.