Optical Parallel Interference Cancellation with Optical Hard Limiter using the lowest threshold value for optical CDMA

Multiple Access Interference (MAI) is the major reason for the system degradation in the Optical Code Division Multiple Access (OCDMA). MAI increases with the number of simultaneous users, resulting in deterioration in the performance and limits the maximum number of simultaneous users. Optical Hard Limiter (OHL) is known to improve the performance of the conventional OCDMA system. However, in the present of other sources of noise, the improvement is not considerable. Moreover, the need for dynamic threshold value in the conventional OCDMA receiver to recover the data is very demanding requirement particularly in the high speed LANs. To overcome these limitations, some studies have been conducted on the Optical Parallel Interference Cancellation (OPIC) through this paper. OHL is placed in front of the receiver side to mitigate the effect of MAI. The study focuses on the lowest threshold value i.e. Th=l. The results are compared to the conventional OCDMA and it shows that, OHL is effective to reduce the power of MAI and a better performance can be obtained by selecting the smallest threshold value. © 2007 IEEE.