Proposed airborne optical fiber asynchronous CDMA systems using fully optical orthogonal codes for real-time avionic data distributions and computer interconnects

We report the design of optical fiber asynchronous code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems using fully optical orthogonal codes (FOOCs), which can be employed to support future airborne real-time communication services. The use of incoherent optical CDMA (IO-CDMA) can result in lower complexity and more reliable implementation than that of the coherent version, so this makes IO-CDMA more adequate for operation in the severe aircraft environment. When FOOCs are used in the IO-CDMA systems, the peaks of all the cross-correlation functions and all the sidelobes of any auto-correlation function are then limited to "1" (i.e., the minimum correlation constraint for incoherent optical processing) in fully asynchronous transmissions. Moreover, proposed systems can effectively support multi-rate and variable-rate data communications with no violation of the minimum correlation constraint and no change of IO-CDMA encoders/decoders. This characteristic can be used to improve the system flexibility and availability. A basic experiment is also demonstrated to verify the characteristics of FOOCs.