Transmission performance of optical code division multiple access network based on spectral amplitude coding

Optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) technique is required to meet the increased demand for high speed, large capacity communications in optical networks. In this paper, the transmission performance of a spectral amplitude coding (SAC)-OCDMA network is investigated when a conventional single mode fiber (SMF) is used as the transmission link. The results can be used as guidelines to assess the effect of various parameters on network performance. Simulation results reveal that the transmission distance is limited mainly by the fiber dispersion when high coding chip rate is used. For a three-user SAC-OCDMA network operating at 1550 nm wavelength with 200 Mb/s data rate and 10 Gchip/s chip rate, the maximum allowable transmission distance for a bit error rate (BER) < 10-9 is about 30 km and it is improved to 120 km when optical amplification and dispersion compensation are absent and present, respectively