Optical frequency-hop multiple access communications system

We propose fast optical frequency-hop code division multiple access (FH-CDMA) for high bandwidth local area networks. Encoding and decoding are achieved by tunable fiber Bragg gratings. Frequency hopping offers many advantages compared to the previously proposed optical CDMA multiple access techniques. The simultaneous utilization of the time and frequency domains offers notable flexibility in the selection of codes, however code families previously developed for radio frequency (RF) communications are not directly applicable to an optical FH-CDMA system. We propose codes to meet the special constraints imposed by our encoding device and present theoretical and simulation results for their performance.