IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
A comparison between the performance of number-state and coherent-state optical CDMA in lossy photon channels
Hossam M. H. Shalaby
Abstract
The performance of optical code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems utilizing number-state light field is evaluated. Lossy direct-detection optical channels are assumed. Both on-off keying (OOK) and pulse-position modulation (PPM) schemes are investigated. For OOK, the exact bit error rate is evaluated taking into account the effect of both multiple-user interference and transmission loss. Upper and lower bounds on the bit error probability for PPM-CDMA systems are derived under the above considerations. The effect of both background and thermal noise is neglected in our analysis. Performance comparison between the number-state and coherent-state OOK/PPM-CDMA networks is also presented. Our results demonstrate that the number-state system requires less than half the energy consumed by the coherent-state one in order to attain the same performance. Lower bounds on the maximum number of simultaneous users are derived for both number- and coherent-state PPM-CDMA systems with asymptotically zero error rate.>