Analysis of Time-Spreading OCDMA Systems With Partially Coherent Sources

The effect of partial coherence of optical sources on the performance of time-spreading optical code-division multiple access (TS-OCDMA) systems is investigated. We develop a simple analytic model for the evaluation of bit-error-rate performance, and verify the validity of the model using Monte Carlo simulations. We present performance comparisons with fully coherent sources as well as statistically multiplexed sources, to indicate a desirable operation strategy of TS-OCDMA systems.