Turbo-coded packet transmission for an optical CDMA network

The performance of an optical code-division multiple-access (CDMA) network with turbo coding is analyzed and simulated. An intensity-modulated and direct-detected optical system employing binary-pulse-position-modulation is considered. The performance of the network is evaluated in terms of throughput-delay characteristics that depend on the turbo coded bit error rate (BER) performance. To eliminate delay capture effects, time-of-arrival randomization is employed. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of such an optical CDMA network can be substantially improved by increasing the interleaver length and the number of iterations in the decoding process for a fixed code rate. Also, it is confirmed that turbo coding is very effective in increasing the number of simultaneous users that can be supported by an optical CDMA network for a given BER requirement.