Turbo-coded optical direct-detection CDMA system with PPM modulation

The performance of an optical code division multiple access (CDMA) system with turbo coding is analyzed and simulated. Turbo codes are parallel concatenated convolutional codes (PCCCs) in which the information bits are first encoded by a recursive systematic convolutional code, and then, after passing through an interleaver, are encoded by a second systematic convolutional encoder. Turbo coding is superimposed on an intensity-modulated optical channel with pulse-position modulation (PPM) and direct detection of the received optical signal, and the performance is evaluated in terms of an upper bound on bit error probability. From the simulation results, it is seen that turbo coding offers considerable coding gain over other methods, with reasonable encoding/decoding complexity. Also, it is demonstrated that, for a fixed code rate, the performance of the optical CDMA system can be substantially improved by increasing the interleaver length and the number of iterations. Serially concatenated convolutional codes (SCCCs) are also considered, and are shown to perform comparably to PCCC in general and better than PCCCs for the case of large signal photocounts. The results in this paper can be applied, for example, to indoor optical wireless LANs.