Direct-detection optical asynchronous CDMA systems with double optical hard-limiters: APD noise and thermal noise

Performance of optical asynchronous code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems with double optical hard-limiters is analyzed in the presence of avalanche photodiode (APD) noise and thermal noise. Optical orthogonal codes (OOC's) are employed as signature sequence codes. In the analysis, chips are assumed to be synchronous among users: the chip synchronous case. Thus, the performance results in the upper bound on the performance of the asynchronous system. The results show that the optical asynchronous CDMA systems with double optical hard-limiters have good performance in the presence of the APD noise and the thermal noise even when the number of simultaneous users is large.