Improved fiber Bragg grating array OFFH-CDMA system using a novel frequency-overlapping multigroup method

The authors propose a novel frequency-overlapping multigroup scheme for a passive all-optical fast-frequency hopped code-division multiple-access (OFFH-CDMA) system based on fiber Bragg grating array (FBGA). In the conventional scheme, the users are assigned those codes constructed on the nonoverlapping frequency slots, and therefore the bandgaps between the adjacent gratings are wasted. To make a more efficient use of the optical spectrum, the proposed scheme divided the users into several groups, and assigned the codes, which interleaved to each other to the different groups. In addition to the higher utilization of the spectrum, the interleaved nature of the frequency allocations of different groups will make the groups less correlated and, hence, lower the multiple-access interference (MAI). The corresponding codeset and its constraints for this new scheme are also developed and analyzed. The performance of the system in terms of the correlation functions and bit error rate (BER) are given in both the conventional and the proposed schemes. The numerical results show that, with the multigroup scheme, performance is much improved compared to the conventional scheme.