Advancing High-Speed Transmissions over OCDMA Networks by Employing an Intelligently Structured Receiver for Noise Mitigation

We propose an intelligently structured receiver to achieve high-speed transmissions over optical code-division multiple access (OCDMA) networks. Employing spectral-amplitude coding (SAC) reduces multiuser interference (MUI) in OCDMA, but the network bit-rate is limited by phase-induced intensity noise (PIIN) coming from the incoherency of light sources. To mitigate PIIN, the receiver performs interference estimations and regenerations through consecutive stages. The MUI is removed by subtracting the estimated interference term from the received multiplexed signals. For PIIN variance, it is both dependent on and positively related to user number and bit-rate. Reducing the number of interference users allows the network to support transmissions with a higher speed under a given noise level. The proposed scheme has the advantages of all-optical signal processing and a compact structure. Additionally, the function of noise suppression is rarely studied in the existing MUI elimination schemes, such as serial interference cancellation (SIC) and parallel interference cancellation (PIC). The simulation results show the proposed receiver achieves significant increment in bit-rate than the conventional balanced detector in SAC–OCDMA networks.