Performance of the R $^{\bf 3}$T Random-Access OCDMA Protocol in Noisy Environment

The effect of both shot noise and thermal noise on the performance of the optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) round robin receiver/transmitter (R
³
T) protocol is examined. Moreover, the impact of dispersion is studied. Several performance measures, namely, the throughput, the protocol efficiency, and the average packet delay are evaluated. Our results reveal that the R
³
T is immune against both thermal and shot noise, and that the effect of dispersion is minor. We found out that there are optimum values for the laser power to compensate for this degradation.