A novel method for increasing the spectral efficiency of optical CDMA

Given K simultaneously active users, an Optical CDMA (OCDMA) receiver needs to discriminate among K codes. Since the number of available codes C is always C Gt K at any given time for any truly asynchronous OCDMA system that employs quasi-orthogonal codes, there is always a set of unused codes. We here propose to exploit these unused codes to increase the spectral efficiency of the system. This can be accomplished by exclusively assigning to each user a set of M codes which represent a log2(M)-tuple of bits so that each user effectively uses a multi-dimensional modulation (multiple information bits per code are conveyed). In this paper, we analyze the performance of such a system and find in closed form an upper bound on the average probability of error. Moreover, we report for the first time that, under lightly loaded, non interference-limited conditions, the multi-dimensional OCDMA scheme here proposed allows us to obtain both higher spectral efficiency and lower bit- error probability (BEP) than a conventional OCDMA system, which employs one code only per user. The analysis here presented allow us to formulate a useful system design criterion that yields truly asynchronous OCDMA systems with very high spectral efficiency.