Optical orthogonal code acquisition in fiber-optic CDMA systems via the simple serial-search method

We analyze, for the first time, the performance of a serial-search algorithm for optical code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems using optical orthogonal codes (OOC). For our analysis, we use advance photon-counting methods and we consider the effect of shot noise and dark current and multi-access interference (MAI). We introduce a new method for modeling the effect of MAI, then we use two approaches to consider this effect on the performance of the synchronization system. For the first approach, we consider the average effect of interference in our analysis, while for the second approach two specific forms of interference are taken into account where one form represents a heavily localized interference pattern and the other shows a uniformly distributed one. The effects of different parameters of the system including system threshold, number of active users in the network, and mean number of photons in each optical pulse on the performance of the synchronization system are evaluated and discussed.