Terabyte Communications

A novel optical CDMA fiber-optic communication scheme is proposed to achieve terabyte communication channel capacity. This scheme is based on spatial spectral encoding and decoding of a low-cost wideband optical source, and optimal multi-user and single-use detection. With optical CDMA, this system can support a large number of subscribers. This number can be much higher than the number of active users that a network can support. The number of users with a Gbps bandwidth can be in the thousands, yielding a total network channel capacity in the order of terabytes. This scheme deals with the physical layer and is thus compatible with any network protocol, such as ATM for multirate multiple simultaneous users. The proposed method has applications in areas ranging from satellite harness, avionics/computer back plane to many military and commercial LAN and WAN, etc. We plan to develop a computer model for performance tradeoff and sensitivity analysis, and to investigate integrated photonics for low-cost implementation.