Utilization of balanced detection with optical hard-limiters in T/W OCDMA system

Abstract In this paper, we utilize optical hard-limiters to further enhance the system performance in balanced detection T/W optical CDMA system. In T/W optical CDMA systems, it had been investigated that the balanced detection scheme is not superior to the OOK scheme because of the adverse impact of beat noise. The employment of optical hard-limiter is an effective way to alleviate the deteriorating effect of beat noise. The carrier-hopping prime code is utilized as signature sequences whose out of phase autocorrelation is zero and the cross-correlation is at most one. Due to the orthogonality of signature sequence, the correlator of shifted version of carrier-hopping prime code is utilized in the receiver. The numerical results reveal that our proposed scheme can greatly reduce the error floor; also it is superior to that using OOK scheme with optical hard-limiter. Most important of all, our proposed scheme has fixed and optimum thresholds which do not vary with system parameters; and this will lead to dynamic estimation of optimal thresholds unnecessary in the receiver.