Capacity of SOA-Assisted SAC-OCDMA

We present, for the first time, the performance analysis of spectral amplitude coded optical code-division multiple access (SAC-OCDMA) systems using a multicanonical Monte Carlo algorithm, and examine the efficiency of semicondutor optical amplifier (SOA)-based intensity noise suppression in SAC-OCDMA as the number of users is increased. We find that noise mitigation offered by SOA rapidly degrades as the number of users increases, contrary to behavior in spectrum-sliced wavelength-division-multiplexed systems. We examine the Gaussian approximation for the noise distribution and find it inaccurate for predicting bit-error rate. We validate our numerical results against published experiments.